Fieldwork is an essential part of forest or environmental inventories and has one of the
biggest parts of the budget, but the way in which the resources are distributed is usually
unknown. The use of a time study of the inventory fieldwork seems to be a good approach to
understand the way the resources are distributed. Time studies have already been used for
many years in the industry and in the forest sector in order to analyze and optimize the
working methods.
This study applies this methodology to study fieldwork of the National Inventory of
Landscapes in Sweden, (NILS) during the season 2004. NILS survey the biological diversity,
its factors and other cultural and recreational values from a national perspective and study its
changes over time. Fieldwork is done by teams of two persons distributed along the whole of
Sweden and includes transportation, field inventory and administrative work.
Each team spend an average of two hours and 25 minutes travelling to the location of the area
of study every working day, in addition they have to walk an average of 16 minutes. The field
inventory is divided into plots and lines. The average time per each plot done by two persons
is 34 minutes. The average time per each line done by two persons is 18 minutes. The average
time spend by a team in the administrative work is 42 minutes every day. The estimation of
the cost of each plot is 1592 SEK and each line 859 SEK. There are 7572 plots and lines
distributed in to 631 landscape areas to be inventoried one fifth every year in a cycle of five
years.
The main factors that influence the consumed time considered in this study are: Area, number
of divisions of the plot, number of intersections found in the line and presence of obstacles
that makes the plot or parts of the line inaccessible. There are some other factors that should
be analyzed in future studies by comparison of the time consumed and the data obtained in the
inventory. The working method used by the different teams was...
