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,...

Floods are the most frequent natural disaster, causing more loss of life and property than any other in the USA. Floods also strongly influence the structure and function of watersheds, stream channels, and aquatic ecosystems. The Pacific Northwest is particularly vulnerable to climatically driven changes in flood frequency and magnitude, because snowpacks that strongly influence flood generation are near the freezing point and thus sensitive to small changes in temperature. To improve predictions of future flooding potential and inform strategies to adapt to these changes, we mapped the...

In 2014 Urban Forest Inventory and Analysis (Urban-FIA) was implemented for the first time ever in Austin, Texas. Work was accelerated and a full complement of plots in the city was measured in six months. In 2015 results are to be released in an FIA report and data made available in a publicly accessible database. In this presentation we discuss the importance of seamless rural to urban monitoring in a state where 85 percent of the population lives in urban areas. We highlight major findings from the Austin analysis and report. We discuss how the data strengthen urban forest management...

In this presentation we describe the urban forest inventory database (U-FIADB) and demonstrate how to use the database to produce population estimates. Examples from the recently completed City of Austin inventory will be used to demonstrate the capabilities of the database. We will identify several features of U-FIADB that are different from the FIA database (FIADB) and discuss whether the differences are out of necessity or by design. Urban forest inventory is a melding of two different inventory systems and approaches, FIA and i-Tree, both of which are well-established and successful in...

In 2002, Wisconsin was part of two pilot projects in cooperation with the US Forest Service. The first was a street tree assessment, and the second was an urban FIA project. The data generated by these pilots changed the way that Wisconsin DNRs’ Urban Forestry Program conducts its business. Although there have been several urban FIA pilot projects throughout the U.S., in 2012, Wisconsin became the first state where those pilot FIA plots were re-measured. The results of this re-measurement demonstrate how urban foresters in Wisconsin have altered their tactics in recent years due to several...

Data from the Forest Inventory and Analysis program (including the Timber Products Output portion) are critical for assessing the sustainability of US timber production. Private sector users of this information rely on it for strategic planning, and their strong support of the FIA program has helped to ensure funding and program viability. Non-timber forest products harvested from US forests also play a critical economic and social role, yet much less is known about their abundance, spatial distribution, and trends. Recent research has demonstrated that FIA data can provide important...

Since the inception of its annual plot design, the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program of the USDA Forest Service has integrated into its data collection operations elements of digital technology, including data loggers, laser distance recorders and clinometers, and GPS devices. Data collected with the assistance of this technology during a typical plot visit comprise measurements of object dimensionality and location, as well as ocular assessments of inventory parameters of interest, all organized in a tabular form. Unlike the wealth of tabular data collected every year on FIA...

Although a prerequisite for an accurate assessment of tree competition, growth, and morphological plasticity, measurements conducive to three-dimensional (3D) representations of individual trees are seldom part of forest inventory operations. This is in part because until recently our ability to measure the dimensionality, spatial arrangement, and shape of trees and tree components precisely has been constrained by technological and logistical limitations and cost. Active remote sensing technologies such as airborne LiDAR provide only partial crown reconstructions, while the use of...

The FIA program has been inventorying the Nation’s forestland since the 1930s. The focus of the CORE FIA program is to capture trees that meet the FIA definition of forestland, in doing so it excludes trees that do not. Leadership recognized the need to fill this gap and the 2014 Farm Bill has instructed FIA to “Implement an annualized inventory of trees in urban settings, including the status and trends of trees and forests, and assessments of their ecosystem services, values, health, and risk to pests and diseases”. The objective of the Urban FIA program is to meet this mandate by not...

The Forest Inventory and Analysis Program is the unrivaled source for long-term, spatially balanced, publicly available data. FIA will continue to be providers of data, but the program is growing and adapting, including a shift in how we communicate information and knowledge derived from those data. Online applications, interactive mapping, and infographics provide broader appeal to a wider audience compared to state reports or peer-reviewed journal articles. This presentation uses ArcGIS Online applications to tell the story of how tree species distributions are shifting in response to...