Treesearch

DSSs have become an essential part of forest planning. FORPLAN was the primary analysis tool for Forest Service land management planning starting in 1980. Although it was cutting edge at the time, there were many criticisms, including it not being user friendly, being difficult for analysts, managers, and the public to understand models and explain results, and expensive to run in terms of computer resources. Computing power has grown independently, and FORPLAN has been succeeded by a long line of alternatives, including SPECTRUM, SIMPPLLE, VDDT, and LANDIS. In most cases, this has...

The lengthy process of planning and preparation that precedes the advertisement of a federal timber sale comes with significant costs in resources and time. After this process is complete, many proposed timber sales ultimately go “no bid” because the value of the prescribed harvest would be insufficient to offset the costs of operations. This problem demonstrates a need for preliminary analysis of the commercial viability of proposed silvicultural treatments prior to sale preparation and implementation. To conduct such an analysis for the Devils Hens Nest Vegetation Management Project,...

Integrating wildlife management goals into forest planning presents multiple complex challenges. Forest growth and yield models that use different metrics than the habitat suitability models wildlife managers use to estimate habitat quality for wildlife species. Moreover, integrating wildlife habitat requirements into forest management planning requires future forest conditions to be linked quantitatively to the habitat requirements of specific wildlife species. Further, for a methodology to gain widespread acceptance, the analytical platform it is constructed on must be readily available...

Forestry is an important component of natural climate solutions. Some forest advocates argue that the best management option for climate benefits is to maximize growth and stop cutting of all forests. Previous modeling comparisons of the carbon benefits of forest managements have not considered how chronic disturbances or reduced natural regeneration of forests may impact carbon dynamics. Exclusion of common forest disturbances may lead to incomplete conclusions about the impacts of forest managements. Here, we used FVS-NE to simulate the effect of forest management on forest carbon...

Manually setting up, executing, and post-processing FVS simulations can be a time-consuming and tedious process. Furthermore, stand polygons appropriate for use in FVS simulations are not universally available, nor is relatively current ready-to-use tree inventory data with which to parameterize those stands. We solved these problems by utilizing the FIA-based TreeMap dataset (Riley et al. 2021) in an innovative collection of scripts that can be executed on-demand through an in-house microservice computing infrastructure.

FIA data from FVS-ready tables packaged with FIADB (Shaw and Gagnon 2020) were used in FFE-FVS to establish prefire carbon pools and fuel loading for trees (live and dead), herbs and shrubs, woody fuels, litter, and duff. FFE was then used to simulate immediate fire effects - tree mortality, fuel consumption, and changes in carbon pools resulting from three wildland fire scenarios (fig. 1). GHG fire emissions were calculated as the product of fuel consumption from the FFE-FVS simulations and pollutant emission factors.

Precommercial thinning is commonly used in mixed conifer forests of the inland northwest region of the U.S. It is widely understood to increase diameter growth of crop trees, and on some sites can also elicit a height growth response, but growth models are needed to quantify these effects. In principle, FVS-IE can capture PCT effects through reductions in crown competition factor (CCF). However, the model was calibrated to reflect gradual, mortalitydriven reductions in CCF as opposed to abrupt changes from active management. Additionally, diameter and height growth are linked in both the...

FVSOnline runs in the free version of the R-Shiny server: https://posit.co/download/shiny-server/. That version does not support secure network traffic, that is, only http and not https protocols are supported. Therefore, we use the Apache web server to provide https service and enable Apache to route traffic between the public network and the R-Shiny server which is set to only accept connections from “localhost” (fig 1). The server we use is running Ubuntu Server 22.0 4 LTS on a 32 core Intel-based Dell computer. The management of software and a user’s project spaces is accomplished...

Canada has a large proportion of public lands whose management falls under the jurisdiction of provincial and territorial governments. Since the 1970s, provincial and territorial agencies have been developing growth models for their own needs, making the Canadian modelling landscape a diversified one (fig. 1). Two variants of FVS are currently being used, one in Ontario and the other in British Columbia.

With forest-based climate mitigation increasingly cited as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, forest management tools that are used to assess and anticipate the impact of alternative management scenarios on carbon storage and sequestration, such as the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS), should accurately and precisely represent forest responses to changing climate. An extension of FVS called Climate-FVS (Crookston et al. 2010) relies on estimates of climatic suitability derived from species-level environmental envelopes to modify demographic processes, such as expected tree growth....