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A goal of a National Forest Inventory (NFI) is the provision of information which is relevant and required for national level decision making and monitoring in forestry, but also for related sectors. This paper presents and discusses a pilot study from Costa Rica where in 2000/2001 a low intensity sampling approach was used to generate national level forestry information. On a 15km×15km grid air photo plots were interpreted for forest and land cover type. Readily available 1997 aerial photographs were used that were, however, only available for about 70% of the country: of the 228 grid points for the whole country only 159 could be aerial photo interpreted. Out of the 15km×15km base grid of sample points, a 2×3 subset was selected for field assessment, resulting in a sample of 40 cluster plots, each comprising of four elongated rectangular sub-plots of 150m×20m located on the perimeter of a square of 500m side …