The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service is in the process of moving from a system of quasi-independent, regional, periodic inventories to an enhanced program featuring greater national consistency, a complete and annual sample of each State, new reporting requirements, and integration with the ground sampling component of the Forest Health Monitoring Program. This documentation presents an overview of the conceptual design, describes the sampling frame and plot configuration, presents the estimators that form the basis of FIA's National Information Management System (NIMS), and shows how annual data are combined for analysis. It also references a number of Web-based supplementary documents that provide greater detail about some of the more obscure aspects of the sampling and estimation system, as well as examples of calculations for most of the common estimators produced by FIA.

Forces of change; Social and economics systems; Forest area conditions; Terrestrial ecosystems; Water quality, wetlands, and aquatic ecosystems.