Treesearch

Land use measurements collected by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program allow for monitoring and modeling changes among a detailed set of land use categories. We analyze these data in the southeastern United States to test hypotheses regarding the influence of timber and other land rents, population growth, and various topographic position variables on transitions among rural and developed land uses. This region provides a complete and recent set of land use and forest measurement, is the most important and dynamic timber production region in the world, and increasingly is the...

What's ahead for woodworkers in construction-based sectors and the planned investments for improving production and profits? For a seventh straight year, construction-based markets continued their growth trends as U.S. spending on multi-family housing increased in 2017, while spending on single family housing and nonresidential construction both increased for a sixth straight year, and spending on repair and remodeling increased for the fifth consecutive year.

Public lands are typically established in recognition of their unique ecological value, yet both ecological and social values of public lands change over time, along with human distribution and land use. These transformations are evident even in developed countries with long histories of public land management, such as the United States. The 20th Century saw dramatic changes in the American population, in distribution and in racial and ethnic diversity, leading to new challenges and new roles for public lands. Our goal with this paper is to review changing demographics and implications for...

The gain-loss approach for greenhouse gas inventories requires estimates of areas of human activity and estimates of emissions per unit area for each activity. Stratified sampling and estimation have emerged as a popular and useful statistical approach for estimation of activity areas. With this approach, a map depicting classes of activity is used to stratify the area of interest. For each map class used as a stratum, map units are randomly selected and assessed with respect to an attribute such as forest/non-forest or forest land cover change. Ground observations are generally accepted...

The term shelf-life is used to characterize the elapsed time beyond which a commodity loses its usefulness. The term is most often used with reference to foods and medicines, but herein it is used to characterize the elapsed time beyond which airborne laser scanning (ALS) data are no longer useful for enhancing inferences for forest inventory population parameters. National forest inventories (NFI) have a long history of using remotely sensed auxiliary information to enhance inferences. Although the combination of model-assisted estimators and ALS auxiliary data has been demonstrated to be...

National forest inventories routinely report estimates of parameters related to aboveground biomass (AGB), but sample sizes are often insufficient to satisfy precision guidelines and reporting requirements. Aerial photography, satellite imagery, and increasingly airborne laser scanning (ALS) data are all used as sources of auxiliary information to address this challenge. Combining inventory ground plot and ALS data requires that the data be co-registered to a common coordinate system. When measuring plots, inventory field crews typically obtain estimates of plot coordinates using global...

Interactions among disturbances are seldom quantified, and how they will be affected by climate change is even more uncertain. In this study, we sought to better understand how interactions among disturbances shift under climate change by applying a process-based landscape disturbance and succession model (LANDIS-II) to project disturbance regimes under climate change in north-central Minnesota, USA. Specifically, we (1) contrasted mortality rates and the extent of disturbance for four individual (single) disturbance regimes (fire, insects, wind, or forest management) vs. all four disturban...

Studies of transient population dynamics have largely focused on temporal changes in dynamical behaviour, such as the transition between periods of stability and instability. This study explores a related dynamic pattern, namely transient synchrony during a 49-year period among populations of five sympatric species of forest insects that share host tree resources. The long time series allows a more comprehensive exploration of transient synchrony patterns than most previous studies. Considerable variation existed in the dynamics of individual species, ranging from periodic to aperiodic. We...

Becoming a fire adapted community that can coexist with wildfire is envisioned as a continuous, iterative process of adaptation, but it is unclear how communities may pursue adaptation. Experience with wildfire and other natural hazards suggests that disasters may open a "window of opportunity" leading to local government policy changes. We examined how destructive wildfire affected progress toward becoming fire adapted in eight locations in the United States. We found that community-level adaptation following destructive fires is most common where destructive wildfire is novel and there...

Over the past 30 years, the cost of wildfire suppression and homes lost to wildfire in the US have increased dramatically, driven in part by the expansion of the wildland–urban interface (WUI), where buildings and wildland vegetation meet. In response, the wildfire management community has devoted substantial effort to better understand where buildings and vegetation co-occur, and to establish outreach programs to reduce wildfire damage to homes. However, the extent to which the location of buildings affected by wildfire overlaps the WUI, and where and when outreach programs are established...