Abstract
The timber stock of mainland Ehime prefecture was estimated using airborne laser profiling data. Our provisional analysis revealed that: 1) at 5,435km^2, the laser estimate of land area obtained as a simple product of flight path length and its 4km width was fairly consistent with the figure of 5,455km^2 by the Geographical Survey Institute, considered the most reliable of the government statistics; 2) on the other hand, at 176 million m^3 for the entire prefecture our estimate of standing timber stock turned out to be twice as much as the government figure of 87 million m^3; 3) judging from the precision in land-area estimation and results from other research, our estimate is considered more likely to represent the actual timber stock than the government figure; 4) thus airborne laser altimetry would provide more accurate national forest carbon budget for the Kyoto Protocol than does the existing national forest inventory; 5) at the present density of laser profiling transects, 4km apart from each other, however, no reasonable accuracy is expected at the municipality level.
