Examination of forest inventory and mapping systems to reduce the number of political units

Forest inventory systems should provide an efficient and logical approach to classifying cover type data. Inventory and mapping procedures that recognize small legal or political units (eg, section lines, quarter-section lines, or 40-ac lines) may be inefficient as some cover types cross these boundaries. This may result in data redundancy, sampling and mathematical inconsistencies, increased sampling and data management costs, and more complex management decision making. An alternative data aggregation and mapping procedure was performed on three representative townships to eliminate redundancy in existing forest inventory data and to reduce the number of similar cover types. -from Authors