Annual forest and fuel attribute maps for western forest managers

Forest Service scientists created new maps requested by managers, including maps of  basal area, board feet, total volume, stand density index, tree density, snag density, stand height, canopy base height, canopy bulk density, canopy fuel load, aboveground tree, belowground, down dead wood, shrub and herb, and forest floor biomass. The new maps are in response to a formal survey of stakeholder needs.

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USDA graphic

Stakeholder responses to survey of mapping needs.

Forest Service and other forest managers often want maps of specific forest and fuel attributes at higher resolutions than Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) is well suited to provide. These maps leverage the sensitivity of airborne lidar to forest structure, and the statistical robustness of Forest Inventory and Analysis data to give managers more confidence in the estimates for these specific forest and fuel attributes.

The team of scientists has associated field plot measures provided by the Forst Service and other partners with airborne lidar datasets where available across the western U.S., which were used to map 15 forest and fuel attributes annually at 30m resolution. These maps can be considered unbiased because they have been calibrated with 2011-2019 Forest Inventory and Analysis plot data.