Continuous-population approach in forest inventory — dealing with the intricate relation between points and trees
1 : Laboratoire d'Inventaire Forestier
IGN
IGN - Laboratoire d'Inventaire Forestier, 14 rue Girardet, 54000 Nancy -
France
Tree populations are difficult to sample, since creating a sampling frame of trees within any larger region of interest is unfeasible in practice. Therefore, in forest inventories, trees are sampled indirectly, by placing fixed-area plots at randomly located points within the region of interest. This implies a simultaneous consideration of two populations — the continuous sampling population of points and the discrete target population of trees — and a need to establish a link between them. In this review paper, we go through the different approaches presented in literature to dealing with this duality, and dissect the statistical reasoning behind each approach, including the assumptions that are often not explicitly stated.