Treesearch

The purpose of this report is to describe how yesterday's trends and today's choices might change the future forest landscape of the Northern United States from 2010 (the baseline year) to 2060. Its results are intended to help resource managers and policy makers identify actions that will sustain the health, productivity, diversity, and resilience of these forests, which provide for the well-being of the 125 million people who currently live in the 20 Northern States and for 32 million additional people expected by 2060.

One purpose of the Northern Forest Futures Project is to predict change in future forest attributes across the 20 States in the U.S. North for the period that extends from 2010 to 2060. The forest attributes of primary interest are the 54 indicators of forest sustainability identified in the Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators (Montreal Process Working Group, n.d.; USDA FS 2011). However, some indictors are virtually impossible to forecast for future decades, so we concentrated on the forest characteristics that have quantitative or experiential bases for forecasting future change....

People enjoy a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits, from forests, including water purification, recreation, income from tourism, timber products, and the cultural and economic benefits from hunting, fishing, and gathering (Shvidenko et al. 2005). Across the Northern United States, growing human populations will place increased service demands on forests for the foreseeable future. The type, magnitude, and stability of future services from northern forests will depend in part on the level of biological diversity in those forests.

This chapter reports projected changes in forest area, age, volume, biomass, number of trees, and removals from 2010 to 2060 for alternative scenarios that bracket a range of possible future socioeconomic and climate conditions in the Northern United States, which consists of 20 central and northeastern States. As described in Chapter 2, the scenarios incorporate different assumptions about population growth, economic development, land-use change, carbon emissions, and climate change. Changes in forest attributes over time for each scenario were estimated using the Forest Dynamics Model...

Forest health will likely be threatened by a number of factors - including fragmentation, fire regime alteration, and a variety of diseases, insects, and invasive plants - along with global climate change (Krist et al. 2007, Tkacz et al. 2008). By itself, global climate change could dramatically and rapidly alter forest composition and structure (Allen and Breshears 1998, Allen et al. 2010). In conjunction with other threats, global climate change poses unique challenges to forest management by influencing forest dynamics at virtually all levels: disturbance regimes in forest ecosystems;...

Forest ecosystem productivity and functioning depend on soil and water resources. But the reverse is also true—forest and land-use management activities can significantly alter forest soils, water quality, and associated aquatic habitats (Ice and Stednick 2004, Reid 1993, Wigmosta and Burges 2001). Soil and water resources are protected through the allocation of land for that purpose or through appropriate management regimes and best management practices (Blinn and Kilgore 2001, Young 2000). Because the biophysical linkage between soils and hydrological functions is strong, conservation...

Forests cover 42 percent of the Northern United States, and collectively they store 13 billion tons of carbon in live trees (29 percent), roots (6 percent), forest floor (9 percent), dead trees (6 percent), and soils (50 percent). About half the biomass of a live tree (dry weight basis) is sequestered carbon (Woodall et al. 2011) - not the largest but the most dynamic source of sequestered forest carbon over time. Through photosynthesis, live trees emit oxygen in exchange for the carbon dioxide that they pull from the atmosphere, storing the carbon in wood above ground and roots below...

Forests are an important source of timber and nontimber products, recreation, ecological services, and employment in the Northern United States. Timber products are primarily used for building homes; manufacturing flooring, furniture, and cabinets; and making paper and paperboard. Residues from forest harvesting operations and wood processing are used for bioenergy, charcoal, and landscaping mulch. The employment opportunities in forestry range from research and development to logging and manufacturing. Maple syrup is the most prominent nontimber forest product in the North in terms of...

The Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) is designed to answer who, where, why and how environmental stewardship groups are caring for our urbanized landscapes. This report is intended to be a guide for those who wish to start STEW-MAP in their own city. It contains step-by-step directions for how to plan and implement a STEW-MAP project. STEW-MAP is both an empirical study of a city's or region's civic environmental stewardship resources and a publicly available online database to help support environmental stewardship broadly in these cities. The project adds a social...

The U.S. North - the 20 states bounded by Maine, Maryland, Missouri, and Minnesota - have a greater forest cover (42 percent of land area) and population density (194 people per square mile) than other large regions of the nation. Ecological, social, and economic changes anticipated over the next 50 years will profoundly affect future forest management needs and opportunities in the North. This report draws on data from numerous sources to analyze 13 scenarios that consider future forest change in response to assumptions about land-use change, economic change, greenhouse gas emissions,...