Sample design

Prior to inventory, a stratification needs to be done. This is valid also in a complete inventory (when all stands in the analysis area are included), since general inventory parameters are set in this part.

A stratum is defined usually based on volume and age from the stand register. The stands (their productive forest land areas) are related to one of the several user-defined strata. The stratum-matrix should first be arranged according to current forest state, and before that, you might want to separate the analysis area (imported in one stand register) into different "levels". A level in this case could be a certain type of forests (e.g., stands with the dominating tree species Pinus contorta) where a certain inventory-scheme should be applied.

When a satisfying stratification of the analysis area has been obtained, the total number of sample stands are decided. First, a stratum will automatically obtain a number of sample stands (depending on the area in the stratum). You should re-distribute the sample stands over the different strata, with a higher sampling intensity in strata with more valuable forests and where forest management decisions are supposed to be more difficult. This part is finished by actually sampling the sample stands in each stratum (done PPS where size is the stand area).

The reason to stratify...

Select the imported stand register, i.e. the analysis area to be in-field inventoried by plotwise sampling in sampled stands (obtaining "strata data"). ...