Evaluating the Change and Future of the U.S. Land Base with the 2020 RPA Assessment

This webinar is part of a series of nine webinars focused on the 2020 Resources Planning Act Assessment, produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service every ten years. It was originally hosted on ForestEd, the Society of American Foresters' online learning platform. It has been lightly edited and uploaded here for easier sharing. If you would like to earn CFEs for this or other SAF offerings, please visit SAF's ForestEd learning platform. 

Webinar information: Human activities and natural processes have significantly altered the land resources of the United States, and these changes are expected to continue influencing most landscapes into the future. This webinar will review results from the Land Resources Chapter of the 2020 RPA Assessment, summarizing recent land use and land cover changes and their effect on landscape patterns including forest fragmentation. Future projections of land use to 2070 will be presented based on RPA scenarios of climatic and socioeconomic change. To highlight the value of the RPA approach, we will hear about how landscape pattern metrics developed for the RPA Assessment have been adopted in European and global assessments and learn how to access and explore RPA projection data. 

Is this technical session for you? This webinar is intended for land managers, policy makers, and researchers—anyone interested in understanding how the U.S. land base has been changing over time and how it is likely to continue to change in the future. Changes in the land base can have significant effects on the resources these lands provide, so anyone with responsibility for evaluating or managing resources would benefit by learning more about ongoing trends and potential futures.