S3One of the major projects of the U.S. Forest Service is a nationwide forest survey, which is designed to obtain useful and timely information about the timber resources of the United States. In the course of the surveys, which are made mainly on a state-by-state basis, great masses of detailed data are collected about timber volumes, growth, timber cut, and other characteristics of the timber resource. In recent years the volume of information obtained from forest-survey field plots has increased greatly. The task of compiling and analyzing this mass of data with mechanical computing machines was both cumbersome and time-consuming. A solution to this problem was seen in the development of the high-speed electronic computers. The Northeastern Forest Experiment Station, which was responsible for conducting the forest survey of the heavily forested Northeastern States, investigated the possibilities and devised the Northeastern Forest-Inventory Data-Processing System. The purpose of this paperand the nine companion papers that will followis to describe the system and its operation for the benefit of others who have similar problems in data processing.S3.