[en] Until now a national forest inventory design has never been considered in Belgium. Nevertheless a so called general census is realized every ten years since 1950 (the tenth since 1846). It chiefly concerns various statistics of belgian forests (covering about 600.000 hectares) dealing with structure, owners, species, ages, volumes and financial values at administrative and forest levels. From a quantitative point of view (volume estimation) these statistics are not very reliable. In our opinion it would be important to complete and to standardize qualitative information by means of objective elements. These would be based upon samplings designs so that all people interested in forest production and its utilization can have a more precise idea of forest areas themselves, state of growing stock (types of volume included) and current rate of growth. According to the characteristics (dimension and structure) of many existing forests, such investigations could be made in two stages : - use of aerial photos to identify representative forest zones useful to be studied; - realization of a set of stratified systematic samplings (intensity : 2-3 ‰; area concerned: about 200.000 hectares) with combination of temporary and permanent circular plots (4-10 ares).
