Long-term strategy for the statistical design of a forest health monitoring system

A conceptual framework is given for a broad-scale survey of forest health that accomplishes three objectives: generate descriptive statistics; detect changes in such statistics; and simplify analytical inferences that identify, and possibly establish cause-effect relationships. Our paper discusses the development of sampling schemes to satisfy these three objectives, but without any design restrictions implied by existing sample surveys. A general vision of a desirable future system will increase chances that short-term decisions will lead to better environmental monitoring systems in the long term.