Understory

Healthy soils play a critical role in supporting healthy forests, serving as the foundation for roots and essential ecosystem processes. Biochar is a useful land management tool for improving soil health. Soil health is a soil’s ability to function as a living system, sustaining biological productivity, environmental quality, and the health of animals and humans. Healthy soils provide clean water, air, gaseous exchange, nutrient cycling, and hydrologic functioning.

Many abandoned mine sites pose environmental and human health concerns, including physical risks like open holes, contaminated soil, degraded water quality, and poor native plant revegetation. One tool for remediating degraded soil is to incorporate biochar in the mine spoils.

The TreeMap dataset provides detailed spatial information on forest characteristics, including number of live and dead trees, biomass, and carbon across the entire forested extent of the continental United States. The objective of TreeMap is to combine the complementary strengths of detailed-but-spatially-sparse Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data with less-detailed-but-spatially-comprehensive LANDFIRE data to better estimate forest characteristics at a variety of scales.

Woody biomass waste material is generated as a byproduct of forest management activities, defensible space clearing, tree trimming, or removing hazard trees. Learn how this byproduct can be used to make biochar using slash piles.

A new midscale framework helps managers identify the most effective treatment strategies to reduce wildfire risk to communities and infrastructure and monitor progress toward risk reduction goals. RiskMonitor is being used to support Wildfire Crisis Strategy landscapes across the West.