About Academy of Forestry Inventory and Planning, National Forestry and Grassland Administration

Academy of Forestry Inventory and Planning, National Forestry and Grassland Administration

The Academy of Forestry Inventory and Planning of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration of China is a production- and science-and-technology-research-based public welfare institution directly under the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, based in Beijing at Beijing 100714 in its researchers' addresses. Since its establishment in 1954, it has undertaken inventory, monitoring and evaluation of natural resources such as forests, wetlands, grasslands and desertified land, wild animals and plants, as well as forest and grass carbon sinks, ecological conditions and natural reserves, together with planning and design, information construction, new technology application, and research and development. It holds qualifications in forestry survey planning and design, engineering surveying and mapping, engineering consulting, engineering design, engineering supervision, landscape garden engineering design and tourism planning and design, and has passed quality, environment and occupational health and safety management system certification. In plain terms, the Academy is the state's own forestry surveyor and planner: the institution that counts China's forests and draws the plans by which they are managed.

History since 1954

The Academy dates its establishment to 1954, five years into the People's Republic, when the new state needed to know what forests it had. Its own profile records that it has adhered since then to the spirit of Professionalism, Dedication, Factualism, Innovation and a quality policy of leading innovation and rigorous excellence. It describes itself, in the profile carried by the Global Green Supply Chain platform of the International Tropical Timber Organization, as a public welfare secondary institution directly under the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, with about 300 employees. Seventy years of continuity through China's institutional reorganisations — the forestry ministry's successive forms, the State Forestry Administration, and the National Forestry and Grassland Administration created in 2018 — reflects the permanence of its function: whatever the administering body is called, someone must maintain the national forest inventory, check its quality and compile its results, and the Academy is a central part of that machinery.

The national forest inventory system

The system within which the Academy works is one of the world's largest forest monitoring enterprises. China's national forest inventory history, as documented in the journal Forest Ecosystems, runs from a first national forest inventory in 1973 to 1976, based on county-level inventories that were not unified for the whole country; a second inventory from 1977 to 1981 that applied the continuous forest inventory method and established an effective foundation for national monitoring, after a 1977 pilot in Jiangxi province led to national specifications on continuous forest inventory in 1978; and successive five-yearly re-inventories thereafter — the third in 1984 to 1988, the fourth in 1989 to 1993, when four national forest monitoring centres were set up responsible for quality check, statistical compilation and output reporting for different regions, the fifth in 1994 to 1998, when a UNDP project introduced 3S technologies — remote sensing, GPS and GIS — the sixth in 1999 to 2003, which achieved full-coverage inventory of mainland China by remote sensing, the seventh in 2004 to 2008, which added ecological variables and evaluated forest ecological services nationwide, and the eighth in 2009 to 2013, which pursued biomass equations for China's main tree species. The Academy's scientists are authors within this system's technical literature, including work on new developments of the China National Forest Inventory and the national inventory technical regulations issued by the administration.

Carbon sinks and biomass science

Inventory data become climate science in the Academy's hands. Academy researchers at its Beijing 100714 address co-authored a Science China Life Sciences study that compiled a forest biomass data set of 5,841 sites from forest inventory and literature, extracted 338 sites with forests over 80 years old as a mature-forest data set, and combined it with the sixth National Forest Resources Inventory to estimate the carbon sequestration potential of China's forests — the kind of estimate on which national carbon accounting rests. Academy scientist Weisheng Zeng is a corresponding author on work developing carbon storage growth models and climate-sensitive variable-parameter models for three major coniferous plantations — larch, Pinus massoniana and Pinus tabuliformis — from 2,680 sample plots of the ninth national forest inventory, published in Forests in 2022. The through-line is methodological: permanent plots, remeasured on a five-year cycle, converted through biomass equations into the carbon numbers that the Academy's own mandate lists under forest and grass carbon sinks.

Beyond forests: wetlands, grasslands, wildlife and reserves

The Academy's inventory remit, in its own words, extends well beyond timber: forests, wetlands, grasslands, desertified and sandy land, wild animals and plants, forest and grass carbon sinks, ecological conditions and natural reserves are all inventoried, monitored and evaluated. That breadth follows the National Forestry and Grassland Administration's own jurisdiction, which since 2018 has spanned forests, grasslands, wetlands, deserts and the protected-area system. China's Forest Ecosystem Inventory System, developed recently on the basis of ecological indicators assessed continuously at forest ecosystem research stations together with the five-yearly forest resource inventory, illustrates the direction of travel: inventory is no longer only counting trees but valuing ecosystem services and ecological status continuously, and the Academy is one of the institutions whose planning, information-construction and new-technology work builds such systems. Its desertification inventory duties also connect it to the national desertification monitoring whose five-yearly results chart China's progress against sand.

Planning, design and qualifications

The second half of the Academy's name is planning, and its qualification list shows how far that reaches in practice: forestry survey planning and design; engineering surveying and mapping; engineering consulting; engineering design; engineering supervision; landscape garden engineering design; and tourism planning and design, each held as a formal qualification or credit, under quality, environment and occupational health and safety management system certification. A public institution that both measures the resource and designs the projects upon it — shelterbelt layouts, reserve plans, landscape and tourism schemes — occupies a distinctive place in Chinese forestry: part national statistics office, part state design institute. Its roughly 300 employees, as recorded in its international profile, make it a mid-sized technical body whose influence runs through the standards, checks and compilations that other, larger field organisations work under.

Information construction and new technology

Two phrases in the Academy's mandate — information construction and new technology application — describe its modernising role. The inventory's own history is a technology history: county compilations in the 1970s, continuous inventory with permanent plots from 1977, the 3S technologies of remote sensing, GPS and GIS in the 1990s, full remote-sensing coverage by the sixth inventory, ecological variables and service valuation in the seventh, and biomass modelling in the eighth and ninth. The Academy's researchers publish on forest inventory data as a resource for understanding biomass dynamics, net primary productivity and carbon cycling at landscape and regional scales, and on the integrated monitoring of forest resources and ecological situations piloted in provinces such as Guangdong. In a data-rich era the Academy's value lies less in any single survey than in the continuity it guarantees: definitions, plot networks and methods stable enough that a carbon estimate for 2020 can honestly be compared with one for 1990.

Why the Academy matters

Every claim about China's forests — their area, their growth, their carbon, the success of the great planting programmes — ultimately rests on inventory: measured plots, checked compilations and consistent methods maintained over decades. The Academy of Forestry Inventory and Planning, established in 1954 and directly under the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, is a custodian of that system and of the wider natural-resource inventory for wetlands, grasslands, desertified land, wildlife and reserves, while its planning and design qualifications turn measurement into management. It is not a university and not a campaign; it is the counting house of Chinese forestry, and in an era when forest carbon is a national statistic with diplomatic weight, the counting house matters.

International profile

The Academy presents itself internationally through the International Tropical Timber Organization's Global Green Supply Chain platform, where its English-language profile records its status as a production- and science-and-technology-research-based public welfare institution directly under the National Forestry and Grassland Administration, its establishment in 1954, its inventory, monitoring and evaluation business across forests, wetlands, grasslands, desertification, wildlife, carbon sinks, ecological conditions and reserves, its planning and information work, and its full list of qualifications and management-system certifications. That an inventory academy maintains an international supply-chain-facing profile reflects where its data end up: in the legality, sustainability and carbon documentation through which Chinese forest products and forest claims meet the world.

Official website: via the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (profile carried by ITTO Global Green Supply Chain platform)