SUKHATME LECTURE*

DATE AND TIME: Monday, November 18, 2002, 4:10 p.m.
PLACE: 171 Durham

SPEAKER:  Tim Gregoire, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies,Yale University, New Haven, CT

TITLE: The Development of Statistical Sampling Methods for Forest Inventory

ABSTRACT:
The advancement of statistical methods for the accurate assessment of forest resources can be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century in central Europe and Scandinavia. In the United States, a legal mandate for a comprehensive and ongoing survey of timber supplies was passed by the 1928 congress. In response the U.S. Forest Service instituted a program of scientifically defensible statistical samples that have evolved and expanded to include multitudes of forest resources and estimators of current status as well as trend. This talk will describe this evolution of increasingly sophisticated sampling strategies within the forestry profession, including large regional surveys by public agencies as well as more focused, industrial surveys. It will also touch on the inferential basis customarily used in forestry, the recent emphasis on forest health monitoring and changeover to annualized surveys
 

COFFEE: 3:45 p.m., 104 Snedecor Hall
 

* This lecture is supported by the Wendell Miller Endowment Fund for Lectureships and the Department of Statistics.