Treesearch

The Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools program (LANDFIRE) is a multi-agency (U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and U.S. Department of the Interior) national geospatial suite of datasets. Born from the Congressional National Fire Plan in support of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, LANDFIRE’s prototype was launched in 2002. Chartered by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council in 2004, this year the program celebrates 20 years of applied science.

In 2019, Maine’s forest products industry had a total economic impact of $8.1 billion. The industry employed over 31,000 people, with $1.7 billion in labor income. Ensuring a sustained inventory is the first link in the supply chain that helps the forest sector thrive—namely, that mills stay open, and jobs remain intact. Recognizing that the forest has potential to produce more timber sustainably may allow the industry to grow. On the other hand, acknowledging the limitations of Maine’s forests will hopefully reduce the risk of creating overcapacity in Maine’s forest products sector....

The structure of forest canopies from the individual tree crown to the stand canopy level informs a range of ecologically significant factors from photosynthetic capacity and tree vigor to wildlife habitat quality and crown fire potential. However, the data needed for characterizing the crown length/crown ratio is often, at best, subsampled during forest inventories. Therefore, it is important for forest growth and yield models to estimate these missing forest inventory values and to project future changes in crown structure. However, the wide range of tree and stand attributes impacting...

Forest conservation and management plans, decisions, and policy analyses are commonly developed and reported using the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) software without substantial investment or attention to ensuring FVS is well-calibrated or unbiased for the decision(s) at hand. The emergence of repeated measurements from plots across the Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA) network of the United States provides a unique opportunity for ensuring predictions of forest conditions and dynamics are grounded in software that is calibrated frequently against the best available contemporary data,...

FVSOnline is an R-shiny (Rstudio 2023) application that can be used to build FVS (USDA Forest Service 2023) simulations, run, and display results. The system has a client-server architecture where the server is a specialized R package that is running in an R session and the client is a graphical user interface running in a web browser. In addition to the components that are accessed via the web browser, there are R functions contained in the FVSOnline package that support manipulation of FVSOnline projects. Projects can contain several FVS runs and each run can contain several simulation...

Effects analyses are an important requirement in federal land management. However, requirements are vague, so specialists must determine how to represent the effects of their treatments. FSVeg Spatial Data Analyzer is an effective tool in completing effects analyses for large-scale landscape restoration projects. The model, which imputes Common Stand Exam (CSE) data, allows users to model FVS treatments, analyze alternatives, and visualize treatment effects for every stand in a project area. In order to model treatment effects in FSVeg Spatial Data Analyzer, one must determine how to group...

The timeframe from project planning and data collection to project implementation can span several years. Having updated stand data sufficient to validate silviculture prescriptions before implementation is critical in making sure the desired conditions and goals from the project are met. For the Blue Creek timber sale located on the Ocala National Forest, the original data was collected in 2008 and 2014 before implementation in 2022. Decisions on which stands to harvest, and silviculture prescriptions were finalized in 2015 based on the original data. Another challenge in this process is...

DSSs have become an essential part of forest planning. FORPLAN was the primary analysis tool for Forest Service land management planning starting in 1980. Although it was cutting edge at the time, there were many criticisms, including it not being user friendly, being difficult for analysts, managers, and the public to understand models and explain results, and expensive to run in terms of computer resources. Computing power has grown independently, and FORPLAN has been succeeded by a long line of alternatives, including SPECTRUM, SIMPPLLE, VDDT, and LANDIS. In most cases, this has...

The lengthy process of planning and preparation that precedes the advertisement of a federal timber sale comes with significant costs in resources and time. After this process is complete, many proposed timber sales ultimately go “no bid” because the value of the prescribed harvest would be insufficient to offset the costs of operations. This problem demonstrates a need for preliminary analysis of the commercial viability of proposed silvicultural treatments prior to sale preparation and implementation. To conduct such an analysis for the Devils Hens Nest Vegetation Management Project,...

Integrating wildlife management goals into forest planning presents multiple complex challenges. Forest growth and yield models that use different metrics than the habitat suitability models wildlife managers use to estimate habitat quality for wildlife species. Moreover, integrating wildlife habitat requirements into forest management planning requires future forest conditions to be linked quantitatively to the habitat requirements of specific wildlife species. Further, for a methodology to gain widespread acceptance, the analytical platform it is constructed on must be readily available...