In accordance with Article 41quater of the Flemish Forest Decree (Vlaamse Regering, 1990) the ‘Flemish forest management’ (i.e., the Agency for Nature and Forests, ANF) has to make a sample based inventory of the Flemish forests with an intervening period of at maximum ten years. The target of the inventory is to ‘ sustain the forest policy concerning forest protection, extension of the forest area and forest management’. And still in accordance with the Forest Decree the inventory must ‘refer to the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of the natural environment in the forests ’. During the period 1997 – 1999 the ANF has carried out the field work for the first forest inventory of the Flemish region. In 2001, a voluminous report was published based on this data collection (Waterinckx & Roelandt, 2001). In this report the authors discussed on the one hand the network design. On the other hand there was an extensive discussion on the dendrometrical and vegetation data by means of tables and graphs. In preparation to the second Flemish forest inventory (= FFI), the ANF wrote in 2004 specifications for the evaluation of the first FFI and the design of the sampling scheme for the second FFI. This two year-project (April 2006 until March 2008) was assigned to the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) in collaboration with the laboratory of Silviculture of the University of Ghent. The task was subdivided in two phases. In a first phase the targets and possibilities of a regional / national forest inventory were stated explicitly, because the policy makers of the ANF felt that the results of the first FFI were used unsatisfactory and they wanted to know the reasons for this. This analysis was the starting point for designing a concrete sampling scheme for the second FFI. During this second phase, the focus was mainly on prioritizing and making explicit the policy questions. Thereupon the sampling scheme and the choice of the variables was elaborated. In a next step an ex ante evaluation of the data ...