A framework for evaluating data acquisition strategies for analyses of sustainable forestry at national level

Analysing sustainable forestry at a national level involves many stakeholder groups and multiple resources; thus, analyses tend to be complicated. To evaluate the consequences of different policy options, scenario analyses often are carried out to assess effects in terms of what goods and services can be obtained from forests. This article concerns the provision of input data to such studies. Owing to the complexity of the analyses and the rapid development in the area of forest inventory methodology it is not straightforward to decide how input data should be acquired. This article provides a framework for how analyses of this type can be addressed as well as a case example to illustrate how different data acquisition methods may be evaluated. The framework comprises two steps: the first is to identify the demand of data connected to the resources included in the analysis; the second step is characterizing the quality of inventory data provided by the data acquisition strategy. As an example, three data acquisition strategies were evaluated; none of them was found to be optimal from all points of views and thus the study concludes with a presentation of an integrated method for data acquisition that is based on data from sampled landscape patches.