Treesearch

The Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the USDA Forest Service monitors and reports on the status and trends of the Pacific Island’s forest resources and ecosystem services. Since 2001 the FIA program has partnered with State and Private Forestry’s, Region 5 and the local governments in the U.S. Affiliated Western Pacific Islands to implement a nationally-standardized plot sampling design on a periodic basis. Permanent monitoring plots are measured on a 10 year periodic cycle across the island nations of American Samoa, Guam, Palau,...

In the winter of 2009, the Pacific Northwest Research Station initiated the ground implementation of their Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program on the Hawaiian Islands. In the Pacific, people from the indigenous to the transplanted, hold intrinsic and utilitarian values of their forests that often differ considerably from values of mainstream mainland USA. These values need to be thoroughly respected in order to obtain the trust needed to collect forestry data in these regions, and the Hawaiian Islands proved to be a challenging place to earn sufficient trust to establish permanent...

Interior Alaska’s boreal forests are approximately 112 million acres in size, or 15 percent of the United States forest land. This is currently a very dynamic region with rising temperatures, melting permafrost, changes in vegetation, fire, carbon, and water cycles due to a warming climate. This is the last forested area in the United States where the national Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program has not been implemented largely due to its remoteness, size, lack of infrastructure, complex logistics, and cost. A pilot study was conducted in the Tanana Valley in 2014 aimed at testing...

Coastal Alaska is a vast forested region (6.2 million ha) with the potential to store large amounts of carbon in live and dead biomass thus influencing continental and global carbon dynamics. The main objectives of this study were to assess regional biomass stores, examine the biomass partitioning between live and dead pools, and evaluate the effect of disturbance on live and dead biomass pools. Data collected by the Forest Inventory and Analysis program between 1995 and 2003 across all ownerships in Coastal Alaska were used to estimate live tree, snag, and log biomass pools in forest...

This study examined the utility of dense time series of Landsat imagery for small area estimation and mapping of change in forest conditions over time. The study area was a region in north central Wisconsin for which Landsat 7 ETM+ imagery and field measurements from the Forest Inventory and Analysis program are available for the decade of 2003 to 2012. For the periods 2003-2007 and 2008-2012, the monthly imagery was processed using harmonic analysis in order to capture seasonal trends in reflectance across spectral bands. A nonparametric modeling approach was used with predictor variables...

Over the past several years, three sets of new temporal remote sensing data have become available improving FIA’s ability to detect, characterize and forecast land cover changes. First, historic Landsat data has been processed for the conterminous US to provide disturbance history, agents of change, and fitted spectral trajectories annually over the last 30+ years at 30 m resolution. Second, the collection of TimeSync data is becoming more widespread and allows image interpreters to capture three decades of forest disturbance and recovery on FIA plots in a consistent and repeatable...

Conversion of forest, range, and agricultural resource lands to residential and commercial uses affects the available land base, management practices on remaining resource lands, habitat quality, and ecosystem services. The Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA) mandate includes monitoring changes in the land area in forest use, and this has proved valuable for policy-makers interested in the effectiveness of laws regulating changes in local land-use. A variety of semi-automated approaches have been used to identify land-use change with imagery, but distinguishing changes in land...

Models of forest succession provide an appealing conceptual framework for understanding forest dynamics, but uncertainty in the degree to which patterns are regionally consistent might limit the application of successional theory in forest management. Remeasurements of forest inventory networks provide an opportunity to assess this consistency, improving our understanding of forest dynamics through succession at regional scales. In this study, we examined the responses of proportional Pseudotsuga menziesii biomass change to successional status, relative abundance, resource availability,...

The air in California’s forests spans a broad range of purity, from virtually no locally generated pollutants to highly elevated levels of pollutants in forests downwind of urban and agricultural source areas. Ten-year remeasurement data from Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plots in California were used in combination with modelled atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition to evaluate tree diameter growth and mortality responses across the state. After controlling for tree size, site productivity, climate attributes, stand density, and competition experienced by each tallied tree, we found...

How vulnerable are US forest to a changing climate? We answer this question using Landsat time series data and a unique interpretation approach, TimeSync, a plot-based Landsat visualization and data collection tool. Original analyses were based on a stratified two-stage cluster sample design that included interpretation of 3858 forested plots. From these data, we derived annual plot-based estimates (with uncertainties) of rates of forest decline from 1985-2012. Noted was a dramatic national-level increase in rates from the mid-90s (<1% of total forest per year) to 2000 (nearly 3% per...