The Italian national forest inventory pursues the following objectives:
• to provide complete and updated information about forest resources to policy decision makers, researchers and to society at large;
• to update and complete national forest statistics, consistent with international standards and in line with Italy’s commitments to international agreements on environment and biodiversity preservation, actions to prevent desertification and implementations to limit greenhouse gases emissions;
• to provide State and Regional public administrations with the required information to implement sustainable forest management principles into forest policies;
• to constitute a network for forest resources monitoring;
• to build a broad and detailed database to be developed into a forestry information system by the use of all available technologies able to implement data acquisition, recording and analysis.
Consistent with these goals, the inventory domain includes not only forests according to the FAO adopted definition, but also the territory covered by woody or shrubby vegetation. Scrubs, woodlands and sparse vegetation are investigated a part from productive formations and forests. The analysis also assesses wood plantations in rural areas, boskets and linear formations outside forest, detected during the land use/land cover assessment on ortophotos (first phase).