Improving annual estimates of key forest attributes
The South Fork of the Flathead River and the complex distribution of surrounding forest conditions. Spotted Bear Ranger District, Flathead National Forest, Montana U.S.
People need accurate, reliable, and timely information about the forests of the United States. Forest managers, policymakers, legislators, and other stakeholders use this information to diagnose forest health, quantify raw material available for forest products, assess wildlife habitat, and develop sound forest policy.
As the nation’s forest census, the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program administers the sole source of authoritative and nationally consistent forest measurement data in the United States. Once collected, FIA also analyzes those data to produce Congressionally mandated reports on the status of and trends in the forests in each U.S. State. FIA data are well suited to assess forests over broad geographic regions and time periods, but FIA stakeholders increasingly demand forest information specific to individual years.
In this research, our team advanced a sophisticated, cutting-edge mathematical technique known as the “mixed estimator” to combine large forest datasets from different years into accurate forest estimates specific to an individual year of interest. Furthermore, our improved mixed estimator uses only FIA data, and it does so very efficiently. This makes the mixed estimator faster and less expensive to implement relative to alternative approaches, delivering critical and actionable forest information in an operationally feasible manner. Our research results show substantial improvements over traditional methods and demonstrate that the mixed estimator has vast potential to provide stakeholders with more timely and reliable forest data. This improved data in turn enables better forest management and policy, ultimately leading to better conservation of our forest resources for present and future generations.