The European National Forest Inventory Network ENFIN: achievements, lessons learned and challenges

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The European National forest Inventory network enfin has been working for more than 15 years on the harmonisation of the nfis. The main driver for its foundation was a lack of comparability of results caused by the variety of national approaches. the 17 member institutions in 2003 where inspired by the idea of harmonisation in a bottom up process and thus developed basic concepts for the harmonisation of nfis on different levels. Actually enfin has 32 member organisations from 29 countries. so far, the network was successful in developing more than 100 detailed and commonly agreed “reference definitions” based on existing international definitions and a thorough screening of national solutions. ENFIN developed and applied so called “bridging functions” to overcome the gap between national and international approaches. the work also included basics for the harmonisation of modelling approaches. all the work was carried out within 24 international projects and is described in more than 40 publications including 4 books. The main challenges for the future work include the harmonised estimation of changes, the demanding development of remote sensing techniques and a common data policy.