The R Package forestinventory: Design-Based Global and Small Area Estimations for Multiphase Forest Inventories
Abstract
Forest inventories provide reliable evidence-based information to assess the state and development of forests over time. They typically consist of a random sample of plot locations in the forest that are assessed individually by field crews. Due to the high costs of these terrestrial campaigns, remote sensing information available in high quantity and low costs is frequently incorporated in the estimation process in order to reduce inventory costs or improve estimation precision. With respect to this objective, the application of multiphase forest inventory methods (e.g., double-and triple-sampling regression estimators) has proved to be efficient. While these methods have been successfully applied in practice, the availability of open-source software has been rare if not non-existent. The R package forestinventory provides a comprehensive set of global and small area regression estimators for multiphase forest inventories under simple and cluster sampling. The implemented methods have been demonstrated in various scientific studies ranging from small to large scale forest inventories, and can be used for post-stratification, regression and regression within strata. This article gives an extensive review of the mathematical theory of this family of design-based estimators, puts them into a common framework of forest inventory scenarios and demonstrates their application in the R environment.
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BibTeX
@article{hill2026package,
title = {{The R Package forestinventory: Design-Based Global and Small Area Estimations for Multiphase Forest Inventories}},
author = {Andreas Hill and Alexander Massey and Daniel Mandallaz},
journal = {Journal of Statistical Software},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.18637/jss.v097.i04},
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05853678v1},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - The R Package forestinventory: Design-Based Global and Small Area Estimations for Multiphase Forest Inventories
AU - Andreas Hill
AU - Alexander Massey
AU - Daniel Mandallaz
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/05
JO - Journal of Statistical Software
DO - 10.18637/jss.v097.i04
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05853678v1
AB - Forest inventories provide reliable evidence-based information to assess the state and development of forests over time. They typically consist of a random sample of plot locations in the forest that are assessed individually by field crews. Due to the high costs of these terrestrial campaigns, remote sensing information available in high quantity and low costs is frequently incorporated in the estimation process in order to reduce inventory costs or improve estimation precision. With respect to this objective, the application of multiphase forest inventory methods (e.g., double-and triple-sampling regression estimators) has proved to be efficient. While these methods have been successfully applied in practice, the availability of open-source software has been rare if not non-existent. The R package forestinventory provides a comprehensive set of global and small area regression estimators for multiphase forest inventories under simple and cluster sampling. The implemented methods have been demonstrated in various scientific studies ranging from small to large scale forest inventories, and can be used for post-stratification, regression and regression within strata. This article gives an extensive review of the mathematical theory of this family of design-based estimators, puts them into a common framework of forest inventory scenarios and demonstrates their application in the R environment.
SN - 1548-7660
ER -