Brief history of Korean national forest inventory and academic usage

The National Forest Inventory (NFI) is important for providing fundamental data for basic forest planning and the establishment of forest policies for the purpose of implementing sustainable forest management. The purpose of this study is to present the development of Korea’s NFI including legal basis, sampling design, and measured variables and to review the usage of NFI data. The survey methods and forestry statistics among the Unites States, Canada, Japan, China, and European countries were briefly compared. Total 140 publications utilizing NFI data between 2008 and 2015 were categorized with 15 subjects. Korea has conducted the NFI 6 times since 1971, but only the 6 th NFI is comparable with the fifth, the previous NFI, because the permanent sampling plots have been shared between the periods. The Korean Forestry Statistics contains only half as many variables as that of advanced countries in Forestry. More researches were needed to improve consistent measurement of diverse variables through implementation of advanced technologies. Additional data for Forest Health Monitoring since the NFI 6 th must be under quality control which will be an essential part of the inventories for providing the chronological change of forest health.