NILS Alpine Mountainous Inventory
The NILS program is the only environmental monitoring scheme that can provide comprehensive data of the vegetation and terrestrial habitats for the Swedish mountain range.
The purpose of Our Inventory:
NILS has been conducting annual surveys in the Swedish mountains since 2003, and continuity exists for all variables over time - both continuous and categorical variables. Habitat is surveyed according to EU's Annex 1 in the Species and Habitat Directive, as well as vegetation types according to the Swedish Mountain Vegetation Map.
It takes five years to complete an inventory interval, and the tracts are re-measured after 5-years. Data from the inventory are used for evaluating the Swedish environmental objective for Magnificent Mountain Environments, reporting habitat to the EU, and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency's National Land Cover Database (NMD).
Since 2021, the alpine inventory used a new design (as the other NILS inventories) that better captures the diversity of the alpine area than the earlier inventory design used in the NILS 2003 – 2020 inventory. The new survey is a two-step inventory that better captures the more uncommon vegetation types and species on the bare mountain terrain.