Issues in forest inventories as an input to planning and decision processes

Forest inventories are complex undertakings as they deal with the versatile resource and ecosystem forest and are to support manifold planning and decision processes and research in forest management, forest policy and related fields on local, regional and national level. Despite of this clear orientation towards decision making, research in forest inventory continues to focus largely on technical-statistical problems, mainly towards the improvement of data procurement, modeling and data analysis. The fundamental assumption appears to be that better information leads to better decision processes and eventually to better decisions. Not many studies, however, do systematically research into this assumption by establishing visible and testable relationships between information quantity/quality and the quality of decision processes.In this paper, we address various issues in this context with particular reference to large area forest inventories. Among the general conclusions is that forest inventory implementation (and also forest inventory research) must develop approaches to systematically include impact assessments that allow evaluating how successful an inventory was, to what extent it answered the formulated questions and to what extent new questions were generated that are relevant to planning and policy processes or for the research agenda regarding the management of forest and renewable natural resources.