Forest damage inventory using the local pivotal sampling method

Abstract

Specially designed forest damage inventories, directed to areas with potential or suspected damage, are performed in many countries. In this study, we evaluate a new approach for damage inventories in which auxiliary data are used for the sample selection with the recently introduced local pivotal sampling design. With this design, a sample that is well spread in the space of the auxiliary variables is obtained. We applied Monte Carlo sampling simulation to evaluate whether this sampling design leads to more precise estimates compared with commonly applied baseline methods. The evaluations were performed using different damage scenarios and different simulated relationships between the auxiliary data and the actual damages. The local pivotal method was found to be more efficient than simple random sampling in all scenarios, and depending on the allocation of the sample and the properties of the auxiliary data, it sometimes outperformed two-phase sampling for stratification. Thus, the local pivotal method may be a valuable tool to cost-efficiently assess the magnitude of forest damage once outbreaks have been detected in a forest region.