Abstract

RIBEIRO, Rui P.; BORGES, José G.; UVA, José S.  and  MOREIRA, João. Modelação de Dados e Desenvolvimento de Tecnologias de Informação no Âmbito do Inventário Florestal de Áreas de Grande Dimensão. Silva Lus. [online]. 2004, vol.12, n.Especial, pp.119-131. ISSN 0870-6352.

The assessment of the sustainability of forest resources management and the trade-off analysis between competing land uses requires researchers and decision-makers to consider an increasing volume of data and information. In this framework, national forest inventories provide the basis for the development of both regional and national strategies and policies. The modeling of inventory data and its physical implementation are crucial for the efficient generation of relevant information and its successful transfer to appropriate users. This paper presents results from research aiming at the development of a data model for the Portuguese national forest inventory. Emphasis was on building a robust, secure and flexible model that might store data from a wide range of forest ecosystems expanding over an area of, approximately, 3 x10⁶ ha. Redundancy problems were also confronted in order to allow for efficient data processing and successful data transfer. This paper further analyses the SQL Server implementation of the data model for the Portuguese national forest inventory. Specifically, the database administration functions, the methods for data import (datawarehouse) and for data processing at various levels of spatial aggregation (data mining) are discussed. Finally, for testing and demonstration purposes, the system is used to generate inventory information. Results are presented.

Keywords : management information system; information technologies; databases; forest inventory.

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