ABSTRACT
Timber stand or the inventory of trees in the forest is both one of the more important statistics about any kind of forest and one of the more easily and more accurately measurable facts about the forest. Inventory of machinery, raw materials, or of finished goods is important to any productive enterprise but it is particularly important in forestry, where inventory of standing timber may range from twenty to as much as fifty times annual growth or annual removals. The size of the inventory, the species which make it up, the size and quality of the trees, and other related factors are important measures of the forest and substantially affect the management alternatives available to the owner/manager, especially for the relatively short-run--and for forests, "shortrun" is one or two decades.
