Articles

Rural communities bordering the Tongass National Forest harvest more than 4.5 million pounds of wild food per year, including 100 different species that our public lands help support. Just how much food is this? An average quarter-pound cheeseburger might weigh around 6 oz, depending on your toppings of choice. Assuming a 6-oz weight, the wild food harvests in this region are equivalent to more...

Throughout the Forest Service's history, agency researchers have helped decrease waste and increase profit in the forestry sector—work that continues today as researchers continue to help streamline nearly every aspect of the industry, from harvesting to hauling to processing to selling.

When most people think of the City of Chicago, they probably picture a modern-looking skyline rising above Lake Michigan, congested urban streets, and iconic architecture. Trees might not immediately jump to mind. However, they form a vast ecosystem amidst the urban footprint that benefits city residents in many ways.Chicago’s urban forest represents a vast natural infrastructure investment. ...

Understory plant communities can be bolstered in the wake of spruce beetle outbreaks. The magnitude of change can depend on the amount of spruce mortality, the frequencies of understory species present at the time of the outbreak, and understory species’ traits.

Scientists found that warmer sites could see up to 5 generations of beetles in a single year, whereas cooler sites would only see 2 generations. More beetle generations translates to more pinyon pine mortality.

We can now quantify (from space!) that following high-severity wildfire events, the mastication of undesirable brush species can result in less evapotranspiration and increases in soil moisture. This information will help managers concerned with water security and forest health in Arizona.

We are working with partners to use cutting-edge technology to study the impacts of a large-scale juniper removal project. This collaborative effort is supporting biomass markets, soil moisture sensing, and real-time drought monitoring in central Arizona.

From creating better sunscreens to disrupting the trade of illegally harvested timber, agency scientists push the boundaries of the wood product sector. 

Most wood used in buildings is harvested from live, mature trees—but much of what we need to remove from forests to reduce fire risk is small diameter trees and dead woody debris. That’s why Forest Service scientists are innovating ways to use and profit from less merchantable forest products. One of these innovations, mass timber.

Conducting prescribed burns in the spring rather than the fall may help promote soil carbon storage.

Lidar is an excellent remote sensing technology to use for mapping fuels and estimating consumption at scales ranging from individual trees to the globe.

The emerald ash borer, which is not a native insect in the United States, spreads very fast in the eastern United States but very slowly in Colorado.

Species mixing in pine-oak forests can help to buffer trees from drought stress, but this positive effect is dependent on the ecosystem and species being studied.

Forests provide tremendous economic value to communities and the nation. They provide timber, safe clean drinking water, recreation opportunities, and countless other benefits. However, these values are missing or undercounted in the nation's economic statistics (for example, in GDP).Forest Service researchers developed the first ever environmental-economic statistics for the United States. Nat...

Research conducted by Forest Products Lab scientists and collaborators has resulted in the first cross-laminated timber (CLT) shear wall seismic force resisting system (SFRS) to be approved in the U.S. model building code. This advance can support more widespread use of CLT in regions of North America with high winds and earthquake activity. It is only the second wood-based SFRS ever approved.

FSim is a wildfire simulation system that models hundreds of millions of large fire events to produce national-scale maps of wildfire probability and intensity – which are critical components of risk.

Managing wildfires for resource benefit can create diverse fire patterns across the landscape that maximize both plant and animal species richness, with different taxa benefiting from different fire characteristics.

We found that most Engelmann spruce seedlings we sourced from Canada all the way down to New Mexico can survive being planted at a high elevation site in Colorado but they differ in the amount that they grow after 45 years.

Fishers were successfully moved from the Midwest established in the Northern Rocky Mountains, but remain genetically distinct from local populations.

Using tree-ring data we reconstructed fire size within our study area, which was then calibrated with recent fire perimeters. Having a complete area-burned reconstruction for the past 300 years we found that the 20-year rate of burning in our study area in the Gila wilderness is now similar to pre-1900 area burned rates.