2.The Review of the Existing Documentation
The review of the existing documentation was organized in the following steps:
Review of the documentation present in the documentation room of the FRA project
Search at the Forestry Library and at the Main Library of FAO
In the documentation room, the work proceeded country by country. At the beginning a screening of all of the documents inside of the country boxes was done. In this way a first selection of the documents containing information on volume/biomass was achieved. For the same country a search through the virtual library (intranet) was done do verify if other useful material was present at the Forestry Library and at the Main Library of FAO. At the Forestry Library only documents that are 7-8 years old are stored. Considering that for the most part, forestry inventories were dated 1960-70 most of the documents reviewed were found either in the documentation room or at the Main Library. The consultation of documents in the Main Library was not immediate as the documents required some days to be acquired. For these reasons the review of documentation from the Main Library was conducted in parallel with the work in the documentation room. After a personal communication with Ms. Annalisa, a review of the country boxes at the Forestry Library was done to avoid the possibility of missing the most recent documentation not yet registered in the intranet database.
In total more than 300 documents were reviewed.
The selected documents were then analyzed in-depth with the aim of assessing their completeness, i.e. meeting the requirements necessary to satisfy the Volume\Biomass Study. The requirements can be summarized as follows:
Regarding reliability, the sampling design, the intensity of the inventory, the use of stand and stock tables or how many trees were cut and measured were carefully examined. At the same time the consistency of the data was verified.
Even if the document didn’t satisfy completely the requirements but were for different reasons interesting they were entered into the general database and marked in the field Bio_util as "F" (false).
Inventories reporting data for the inventoried area as a whole, without giving details per forest block or unit, were considered as one spatial unit. For those inventories reporting data for forest blocks where it was not possible to locate geographically with sufficient precision, the block location average (the weighted average) between the strata was calculated and applied to the whole area inventoried.
Out of the 300 documents reviewed, 109 were considered to meet the requirements of the Volume/Biomass Study, resulting in forest inventory data entered for 101 blocks.
To achieve one of the objectives of the work, attention was paid on how to locate the area and the plots inventoried from a geographical point of view. Most of the documents were without a map. Some maps were annexed but supposedly were lost. In others there were maps but without any coordinates. In some inventories, while the maps were absent, the description of the area was so detailed that geographically locating the area was possible. However, this was possible only when the limits mentioned were natural limits, e.g. rivers, coastline, etc., or administrative boundaries at sub-national levels. For this I took advantage of the map library (A.G.L.). Normally these maps were at 1:500000/1000000 scale.
