Enhanced forest inventories in Canada: implementation, status, and research needs

Forest inventory practices in Canada have evolved over time with changes in forest management priorities, advances in technology, fluctuations in the marketplace, societal expectations, and generational shifts in the workforce. Provincial and territorial governments in Canada are vested with forest management responsibilities and each jurisdiction has adopted forest inventory approaches that reflect jurisdictional information needs and contexts. Typically, these inventories are strategic in nature and spatially explicit, providing stand-level forest attribute information derived from a two-phase approach involving manual air photo interpretation and stratified ground plot sampling. Airborne laser scanning (ALS; also known as light detection and ranging or lidar) has emerged as a transformative data source for forest inventories and is now considered operational, with the resulting outputs commonly referred to as enhanced forest inventories (EFI). Herein we review and synthesize how EFIs are influencing forest inventory practice in Canada. We characterize the spatial coverage and characteristics of ALS data acquired for forest inventory purposes, summarize the current status of EFI implementation within Canada's provinces and territories, identify emerging trends associated with these EFIs, and consider these EFIs in the broader global context. We also highlight common research gaps towards the development of a nationally and globally relevant research agenda to support the greater integration of remotely sensed data into forest inventory programs in Canada and beyond.