Brazilian National Forest Inventory – a landscape scale approach to monitoring and assessing forested landscapes

The strategic importance of forest resources, both at the national and global level, as well as the scarcity of reliable qualitative and quantitative information about Brazilian forests are among the motivations that led to the implementation of a new national forest inventory in Brazil (IFN-BR). Beyond traditional field survey through clustered sampling, the IFN-BR incorporates Landscape Sample Units (LSU) as a geospatial component of the inventory. Landscape indicators and indices are generated through the analysis of land use/land cover in the LSUs, which provide information about composition, morphology, mosaic patterns, adjacent habitat similarity, connectivity, fragmentation, and state of riparian zones. In the current study, we describe the indicators selected to assess landscape using pilot LSUs established in Paraná State, as well as the calculation and composition of indices and scores.