Abstract: Diverse and often conflicting demands upon land and natural resources around the world require require that decision makers cater for a wide range of potential human interests within any given area such as agriculture, biomass production, biodiversity, recreation, and urban expansion. This means that administrators have to look at the land and its resources for a variety of potential uses. To increase the benefits of data collected and to minimize expenditures, inventory specialists are turning more and more to multipurpose or integrated resource inventories. This is particularly true at the broader decision-making scales - provincial, national, regional and global. These guidelines provide basic information on Multipurpose Resource Inventories (MRI) for the inventory planner and the decision maker at the provincial or national level although the instructions are useful at the local level as well. The guidelines are based upon the world wide survey mentioned above, a literature review and the personal experiences of nearly 60 contributing co-authors. We discuss the need for MRIs, the information requirements, support structure, and the design and implementation issues in depth.
