Articles

For six years, Forest Inventory and Analysis has supported the Oconaluftee Job Corps CCC by providing training in how to do forest inventories.

Updated tax tips are available as a forest landowner resource for the 2025 tax season.

Participate in a public engagement session to help evaluate emergency messages.

New research shows that in addition to the other benefits of longleaf pine forests, they also use significantly less water than fast growing loblolly pine forests.

Huge quantities of data on prescribed fire are being collected and will eventually inform next-generation models of fuel, fire behavior, fire effects and smoke. The work will improve prescribed fire planning tools and aims to make prescribed fires easier and safer to implement.

The Athens Prescribed Fire Science Laboratory of the USDA Forest Service is a mesoscale combustion facility dedicated to advancing prescribed fire science. The facility allows the team and their partners to make new discoveries about the basic physics of fire behavior, spread, and smoke. Making prescribed fires safer is a goal that brings participants together.

Wildfire risks will continue to evolve as both society and forests change across the southeastern United States, according to a new report.The report is one part of the Southern Forest Outlook, a project undertaken by the USDA Forest Service in partnership with the Southern Group of State Foresters to help forest managers and the public understand changing forest conditions in the South over th...

The Southern Research Station recently supported a tree climbing workshop. Nine Southern Region employees became certified climbers and will be ready to help with hazard limb removals, cone collection, and other projects.

New research measures and communicates wildfire risk to people and infrastructure across the Southeast, including a suite of maps and tools. This new ‘geography of fire’ can help decision makers manage risk, build community and forest resilience, and improve conservation outcomes.

New research highlights the importance of classifying pests as specialists or generalists. The researchers compared two approaches and found that the specialist-generalist continuum is the most useful.

Fire scientists and practitioners are working together to coproduce new tools for managing wildfires and making prescribed fires safer and easier to implement. Prescribed fires can reduce hazardous fuels, and many ecosystems are fire-adapted which means they require regular fire to stay healthy.

Researchers from the Eastern Innovation Landscape Network are leaders in a multi-agency, multidisciplinary project to accelerate the development and implementation of wildland fire and fuels science to inform fire, land, and community decision-makers.

SRS scientists, in collaboration with regional fire management experts, developed tools that estimate wildfire risk across the Southeast by fire frequency and severity and the socioeconomic vulnerability of nearby communities.

Decision makers can anticipate dramatic increases in wildfire suppression spending in the rest of the 21st century. Projected changes are mainly due to the effects of a changing climate, requiring increased spending to protect communities and natural resources from higher overall rates of wildfires.

While harvesting wood from forests can reduce the carbon they store, these demands also encourage more forest planting. Faster-growing planted forests are able to close the carbon gap.

Biochar can be used as a soil amendment, for carbon sequestration, and for removal of heavy metals from wastewater or contaminated soils. SRS is generating biochar from southern hardwoods and evaluating its chemical and physical properties in an effort to create sustainable new markets for small-diameter wood.

Future Forests: Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change explores how different forest ecosystems around the world are affected by climate change and how these forests, in turn, influence climate patterns.

A team of SRS researchers partnered with North Carolina State University to investigate what factors were most associated with tree mortality after a "hot drought."

SRS researchers conducted a socio-ecological study examining resident responses to affordable housing built near urban forest patches.

SRS scientists used the Forest Dynamics Model to project the area of mature and old growth forests on federal lands and to assess climate threats to these forests under varying climate futures.