Quality Assurance

The National Forest Inventory will collect, maintain and analyse a standard set of core data on all forests and woodlands so that comparable information exists across England, Scotland and Wales and categories of ownership. The nature of this data will be driven by information needs that are recognised to be both enduring and relevant across the range of forest types in Britain.

The National Forest Inventory will rationalise effort by removing duplication in survey and analysis – ‘measuring once’ and using data for many different purposes.

Inventory outputs will be compatible with outputs from other European forest inventories, facilitating national and international data sharing and reporting.

Inventory data will be ‘baselined’ to allow changes to be detected between reporting periods.

The value of inventory data will be enhanced through combination with other data, models, and software applications. For example:

• Growth and yield and carbon lifecycle models.
• Growers’ data on species, age and management plans.
• National datasets, for example: woodland history and access.

Inventory outputs will be broadly compatible with outputs from other European forest inventories, facilitating national and international data sharing and reporting, together with indications of their estimated accuracy – expressed in the form of standard errors or confidence intervals.

The National Forest Inventory will comply with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics (published in 2009) and in due course will be put forward for assessment by UK Statistics Authority, with the aim that subsequent outputs will be designated as ‘National Statistics’.