Treesearch

In California, the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plots within large fires were visited one year after the fire occurred resulting in a time series of measurements before and after fire. During this additional plot visit, the standard inventory measurements were augmented for these burned plots to assess fire effects. One example of the additional measurements is the post fire index (PFI), which is a fire severity classification based on post-fire crown observations. Stands that showed presence or no evidence of residual green crowns were assigned to PFI classes Alive and Dead...

Forest inventory datasets offer unprecedented opportunities to model forest dynamics under evolving environmental conditions but they are analytically challenging due to irregular sampling time intervals of the same plot, across the years. We propose here a novel method to model dynamic changes in forest biomass and basal area using forest inventory data. Our methodology involves the following steps: 1) parameterize transition matrices for biomass using Gibbs sampling, 2) incorporate dynamic disturbance and forest growth scenarios and 3) simulate transient dynamics and stationary states...

REDD+, Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation is a United Nations initiative targeted to combat atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming by providing monetary incentives to developing countries to preserve their forested land as effective carbon sinks. In order for these countries to receive this monetary benefit, they must develop and implement forest monitoring, reporting and validation (MRV) programs that effectively quantify the amount and change of “forested” land, the “health” of the forests, and estimate the amount of carbon in these forests. The USFS...

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...