Nationale Bosinventarisatie 8

The Netherlands has committed itself internationally to report many forest-related matters such as greenhouse gas emissions, wood harvest statistics and biomass, according to the UNFCCC regulations, the Kyoto Protocol (category Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry, LULUCF), Global Forest Resource Assessment (GFRA),  International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO/ITTA) and Forest Europe (the former Ministerial Conference on Protection of Forests in Europe, MCPFE). Several new policy challenges and applications from a legal framework have recently been added to this: EU Green Deal and EU Fit for 55, the National Climate Agreement and the National Forest Strategy. The Dutch Forest Inventory (NBI) also provides information for reporting for the European Habitats Directive. All these reports require data from forest inventories, included in the NBI. In addition to these legal obligations, there are also national reporting obligations arising from the Nature Conservation Act that use the data from the NBI, namely the Assessment of the Human Environment, the Nature Compendium and the Nature Outlook.

In addition, the NBI has an important informative function for the domestic forestry and timber sector.

The most important data required for these (inter)national reports are the forest area, and the (changes in) standing wood stock, the additional growth, harvest and biomass (and carbon stocks derived from this) on this forest area in the Netherlands. The respective reports ask for subdivisions of surface area (e.g. per owner, main tree species, forest type) or of wood volume (e.g. standing/lying dead wood, living, tree species, diameter).

In a five-year cycle, all sample points within the NBI are included once and the results are reported once. A new cycle will start in 2022. New in the NBI-8 is the collection of information about the soil at the sampling points and the inclusion of groves with an area of less than 0.5 ha.