title: Extending large-scale forest inventories to assess urban forests.
abstract: Urban areas are continuously expanding today, extending their influence on an increasingly large proportion of woods and trees located in or nearby urban and urbanizing areas, the so-called urban forests. Although these forests have the potential for significantly improving the quality the urban environment and the well-being of the urban population, data to quantify the extent and characteristics of urban forests are still lacking or fragmentary on a large scale. In this regard, an expansion of the domain of multipurpose forest inventories like National Forest Inventories (NFIs) towards urban forests would be required. To this end, it would be convenient to exploit the same sampling scheme applied in NFIs to assess the basic features of urban forests. This paper considers approximately unbiased estimators of abundance and coverage of urban forests, together with estimators of the corresponding variances, which can be achieved from the first phase of most large-scale forest inventories. A simulation study is carried out in order to check the performance of the considered estimators under various situations involving the spatial distribution of the urban forests over the study area. An application is worked out on the data from the Italian NFI.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Ambiente Forestale e delle sue Risorse, Università della Tuscia, via San Camillo de Lellis, s.n.c., 01100 Viterbo, Italy. piermaria.corona@unitus.it
authors.forename: Piermaria
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Corona
authors.forename: Mariagrazia
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Agrimi
authors.forename: Federica
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Baffetta
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Barbati
authors.forename: Maria Vincenza
authors.initials: MV
authors.lastname: Chiriacò
authors.forename: Lorenzo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Fattorini
authors.forename: Enrico
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Pompei
authors.forename: Riccardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Valentini
authors.forename: Walter
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Mattioli
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D002947:Cities; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D016468:Forestry / Q000379:methods*; D007558:Italy; D014197:Trees / Q000145:classification / Q000254:growth & development*