Treesearch

Understanding how climate affects tree growth is essential for assessing climate change impacts on forests, but is complicated by the effects of competition, which strongly influences growth and could alter how forests respond to climate change. We characterized the joint effects of climate and competition on diameter growth in the mountain forests of Mount Rainier National Park, Washington State, USA using long-term (32-year) forest monitoring data from permanent sample plots in mature and old-growth stands. To analyze the data, we adapted the diameter growth function from ORGANON (a...

The Forest Inventory and Analysis Program strives to make its data publicly available in a format that is easy to use and understand most commonly accessed through online tools such as EVALIDator and Forest Inventory Data Online. This requires a certain amount of data reduction. Using a common data request concerning the resource of southern yellow pine (SYP), we demonstrate how results may vary depending on the particular data reduction approach employed. We used the loblolly-shortleaf pine forest-type group (FTG) and the longleaf-slash pine FTG as surrogates for SYP. The volume of our...

The landscape of the central United States is dominated by cropland and rangeland mixed with remnants of short- and tall-grass prairies that were once prevalent. Since the last ice age, these areas had sparse tree cover due to cyclical severe droughts, intentional fires used by indigenous people as a land management tool, and natural fires caused by lightning. More recently, tree cover is suppressed by tillage or grazing. However, the combination of fire suppression and idling of farmland due to conservation programs and periodic downturns in the agricultural economy allows woody species...

The National Report on Sustainable Forests—2015 relies on Montrèal Process Criteria and Indicators (C&I) for Forest Sustainability to organize and present data relevant to U.S. forests. The 2015 report addresses seven criteria, the first of which is Conservation of Biological Diversity, which is organized into nine indicators that address three sub-criteria: ecosystem diversity, species diversity, and genetic diversity. Selected highlights from the report include the following. Total forest land area increased by 14 million acres since the previous report. Area of timberland increased by 7...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is the largest terrestrial carbon (C) sink on earth and management of this pool is a critical component of global efforts to mitigate atmospheric C concentrations. Soil organic carbon is also a key indicator of soil quality as it affects essential biological, chemical, and physical soil functions such as nutrient cycling, water retention, and soil structure maintenance. Much of the SOC on earth is found in forest ecosystems and is thought to be relatively stable. That said, there are a growing number of studies documenting the sensitivity of SOC to global change...

Increasingly, random forest models are used in predictive mapping of forest attributes. Traditional random forests output the mean prediction from the random trees. Quantile regression forests (QRF) is an extension of random forests developed by Nicolai Meinshausen that provides non-parametric estimates of the median predicted value as well as prediction quantiles. It therefore allows spatially explicit non-parametric estimates of model uncertainty. Here, we illustrate how to use QRF in predictive mapping of continuous forest attributes such as tree canopy cover and biomass. Using FIA plot...

Since 1971, South Korea has implemented national forest inventory (NFI) in pursuance of understanding current state and change trend of national forest resources. NFI1 (1971~1975), NFI2 (1978~1981), NFI3 (1986~1992) and NFI4 (1996~2005) were implemented in order to produce national forest resources statistics. However, since the early 1990s, international conventions and organizations started to require diverse forest information for the sustainable forest management and periodic monitoring of forest resources. Following these requirement, South Korea reformed total national forest...

The Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the USDA Forest Service monitors and reports on the status and trends of the Pacific Island’s forest resources and ecosystem services. Since 2001 the FIA program has partnered with State and Private Forestry’s, Region 5 and the local governments in the U.S. Affiliated Western Pacific Islands to implement a nationally-standardized plot sampling design on a periodic basis. Permanent monitoring plots are measured on a 10 year periodic cycle across the island nations of American Samoa, Guam, Palau,...

Floods are the most frequent natural disaster, causing more loss of life and property than any other in the USA. Floods also strongly influence the structure and function of watersheds, stream channels, and aquatic ecosystems. The Pacific Northwest is particularly vulnerable to climatically driven changes in flood frequency and magnitude, because snowpacks that strongly influence flood generation are near the freezing point and thus sensitive to small changes in temperature. To improve predictions of future flooding potential and inform strategies to adapt to these changes, we mapped the...

In 2014 Urban Forest Inventory and Analysis (Urban-FIA) was implemented for the first time ever in Austin, Texas. Work was accelerated and a full complement of plots in the city was measured in six months. In 2015 results are to be released in an FIA report and data made available in a publicly accessible database. In this presentation we discuss the importance of seamless rural to urban monitoring in a state where 85 percent of the population lives in urban areas. We highlight major findings from the Austin analysis and report. We discuss how the data strengthen urban forest management...