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Title:	The effect of blurred plot coordinates on interpolating forest biomass: a case study
Author(s):	Coulston, J. W.; Reams, Greg A.
Date:	2004
Source:	In: Proceedings of the joint meeting of the 15th annual conference of the International Environmetrics Society and the 6th international symposium on spatial accuracy assessment in natural resources and environmental sciences.
Description:	Interpolated surfaces of forest attributes are important analytical tools and have been used in risk assessments, forest inventories, and forest health assessments. The USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA) annually collects information on forest attributes in a consistent fashion nation-wide. Users of these data typically perform interpolations with the kriging or inverse distance weighting methods which requires the coordinates of each FIA plot. However because of privacy issues, FIA uses two methods to manipulate plot locations to insure landowner privacy. The influence these manipulations have on the accuracy of interpolated surfaces is unknown. We investigated the influence by comparing actual and interpolated estimates of forest biomass created from data with manipulated coordinates for three interpolation techniques. We found that kriging consistently under-performed the inverse distance and Thiessen polygon methods. Overall the inverse distance method performed best. We suggest using the inverse distance method for spatial interpolation of FIA data with blurred plot coordinates when relatively little spatial autocorrelation exists.
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