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Abstract
International forest sustainability reporting by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service is pursuant to the Montréal Process Criteria and Indicators (C&I; Montréal Process Liaison Office 2015). That framework includes measures of forest fragmentation that have evolved substantially over three decades of reporting (Riitters and Robertson 2021). The most recent report, for the years 2001 to 2016, indicated that fragmentation continued to increase but at a decreasing rate over that time interval (Riitters and Robertson 2021). The objective of this chapter is to update the fragmentation information by incorporating new land cover data for the year 2019 and the accompanying revisions to the earlier land cover data. Unlike the 5-year reporting of conterminous United States (CONUS) conditions in the most recent report, this chapter evaluates changes over 2- and 3-year time intervals and evaluates conditions within eight regions (fig. 5.1) and by county.
Parent Publication
Citation
Riitters, K.; Costanza, J.K.; Schleeweis, K.G. 2024. Updating the sustainability indicators of forest cover fragmentation for the United States from 2001 to 2019. In: Pandit, K.; Conkling, B.L., eds. Forest Health Monitoring: national status, trends, and analysis 2023. Gen. Tech. Rep. WO-105. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service: 101–111. Chapter 5. https://doi.org/10.2737/WO-GTR-105-Chap5.
