There were several deficiencies in the past inventory design that limited its use- 

 fulness for intensive forest management. First, tlie ground sample locations described 

 only a l-acre portion or less of the stand in which the sampling location occurred. 

 For several aspects of management, this area is inadequate. For example, silvicultural 

 prescriptions based on such a limited portion of the stand often differed from the 

 prescription that would have resulted had the entire stand been sampled, and had its 

 relation to adjacent stands and other land-use determinants been described. For another 

 example, the cover conditions of watersheds were inadequately described under the former 

 design. To evaluate the impact of vegetation changes on runoff requires data that 

 describe the forest cover in terms of the extent of stands and their spatial relations. 

 As a final example, the ecological habitat was often inadequately classified from 10- 

 point location data. In areas of disturbed vegetation, or where spatial variability 

 characterizes the distribution of species, an area substantially larger than a single 

 acre is required if the habitat classification is to be reliable. Hence, statistics 

 compiled from widely scattered locations provided a misleading picture of the forest 

 management opportunities. 



The second major weakness was that the information from the second stage--the 

 stand examination phase--was ignored in developing the estimates for the working circle. 

 One reason for ignoring the stand examination data vvas that the detail of the measure- 

 ments and their quality were not up to the standards of the first stage. Another 

 reason was that the procedure by which stands were selected for examination provided 

 no way to express the particular stand as a sample of the working circle. Though it 

 would have been theoretically possible to assign examined stands to one subpopulation 

 and the remainder of the forest area to another, there was no way to clearly define 

 the sub populations after stand boundaries had been obliterated by management practice. 

 The opportunity to concentrate the second stage of stand examination on classes of stands 

 of particular management interest (e.g., young dense stands in need of thinning) had 

 been proposed as a desirable feature of the two-stage approach. In practice, it 

 appears that the stand examination procedure was not a means to seek out new opportuni- 

 ties, but rather a means to verify the manager's existing impressions of the forest 

 conditions . 



3 



