Projecting native forest inventory estimates from public to private tenures

Summary

Inventory information on privately managed forest areas tends to be more variable and less available than for equivalent publicly managed forests. This paper reports on an examination of the timber volume on Tasmanian private and public native forests and demonstrates that the differences between tenures in terms of total (entire stem) volume (m³ ha⁻¹) are significant but relatively small. The paper also demonstrates that information from public forest inventories may be used to generate auxiliary information that can improve the efficiency of sampling on equivalent private forests. Regression and variable probability sampling using auxiliary information generated from public forest inventories can reduce the need for establishing sample points in private forests to only 25% of that required under simple random sampling for a given level of precision.

Keywords:

• forest inventories
• volume determination
• sampling
• tenure systems
• Tasmania