Treesearch

A tree canopy cover (TCC) map is one of three elements in the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2011 suite of nationwide geospatial data layers. In 2010, the USDA Forest Service (USFS) committed to creating the TCC layer as a member of the Multi-Resolution Land Cover (MRLC) consortium. A general methodology for creating the TCC layer was reported at the 2012 FIA Symposium in Knoxville, Tennessee by several USFS researchers. Since that time, remote sensing specialists at the USFS Remote Sensing Application Center (RSAC) have translated those general methods into a process capable of being...

Data from the Forest Inventory and Analysis program (including the Timber Products Output portion) are critical for assessing the sustainability of US timber production. Private sector users of this information rely on it for strategic planning, and their strong support of the FIA program has helped to ensure funding and program viability. Non-timber forest products harvested from US forests also play a critical economic and social role, yet much less is known about their abundance, spatial distribution, and trends. Recent research has demonstrated that FIA data can provide important...

A fundamental goal of forest biogeography is to understand the factors that drive spatiotemporal variability in forest growth across large areas (e.g., states or regions). The ancillary collection of increment cores as part of the IW FIA Program represents an important non-traditional role for the development of unprecedented data sets. Individual-tree growth data from increment cores were paired with plot-level variables from the inventory to investigate the spatiotemporal growth patterns for Douglas-fir, ponderosa pine, common pinyon, and limber pine over the northern portion of the...

Raster modeling is an integral component of spatial analysis. However, conventional raster modeling techniques can require a substantial amount of processing time and storage space, often limiting the types of analyses that can be performed. To address this issue, we have developed Function Modeling. Function Modeling is a new modeling framework that streamlines the raster modeling process by utilizing delayed reading methods. Using this approach, we have successfully characterized the impacts of fuel treatments on soil erosion, estimated basal area, trees, and tons of above ground biomass...

Since the inception of its annual plot design, the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program of the USDA Forest Service has integrated into its data collection operations elements of digital technology, including data loggers, laser distance recorders and clinometers, and GPS devices. Data collected with the assistance of this technology during a typical plot visit comprise measurements of object dimensionality and location, as well as ocular assessments of inventory parameters of interest, all organized in a tabular form. Unlike the wealth of tabular data collected every year on FIA...

Although a prerequisite for an accurate assessment of tree competition, growth, and morphological plasticity, measurements conducive to three-dimensional (3D) representations of individual trees are seldom part of forest inventory operations. This is in part because until recently our ability to measure the dimensionality, spatial arrangement, and shape of trees and tree components precisely has been constrained by technological and logistical limitations and cost. Active remote sensing technologies such as airborne LiDAR provide only partial crown reconstructions, while the use of...

The FIA program has been inventorying the Nation’s forestland since the 1930s. The focus of the CORE FIA program is to capture trees that meet the FIA definition of forestland, in doing so it excludes trees that do not. Leadership recognized the need to fill this gap and the 2014 Farm Bill has instructed FIA to “Implement an annualized inventory of trees in urban settings, including the status and trends of trees and forests, and assessments of their ecosystem services, values, health, and risk to pests and diseases”. The objective of the Urban FIA program is to meet this mandate by not...

A novel clustering method for bivariate functional data is proposed to group streams based on their water–air temperature relationship. A distance measure is developed for bivariate curves by using a time-varying coefficient model and a weighting scheme. This distance is also adjusted by spatial correlation of streams via the variogram. Therefore, the proposed distance not only measures the difference among the streams with respect to their water–air temperature relationship but also accounts for spatial correlation among the streams. The proposed clustering method is applied to 62 streams...

Exurban development (e.g., second homes) in woodlands spreads urban land use impacts beyond suburbs, but because exurban developments often retain many components of original ecosystem structure—such as a forest canopy rather than open lawn—their ecological impacts may be underestimated. Changes in seed-dispersing ant behavior prompted by exurban land use, such as edge avoidance, may pose deleterious impacts on the woodland plants (myrmecochores) they disperse, and hence the floristic diversity of exurban forests. We examined the effects of exurbanization on seed-dispersing ant nesting and...

As the people of Southern Appalachia confront the challenges of climate change and exurban development, their foundational beliefs about the environment and human-environment relations will significantly shape the types of individual and collective action that they imagine and pursue. In this paper, we use critical discourse analysis of an influential small-town newspaper to understand how the environment is being represented publicly and consider how these representations might affect local environmental politics and efforts to mitigate or adapt to climate change and exurban sprawl. We...