Treesearch

The National Forest System (NFS) Pacific Northwest Region (R6) has been flying LiDAR on a per project basis. Additional field data was also collected in situ to many of these LiDAR projects to aid in the development of predictive models and estimate values which are unattainable through LiDAR data alone (e.g. species composition, tree volume, and downed woody material). Until now, the protocols for collecting vegetation field data within LiDAR project areas have varied from project to project, leading to the inability to share, use, or analyze data across multiple project areas. The R6...

Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plot location coordinate precision is often insufficient for use with high resolution remotely sensed data, thereby limiting the use of these plots for geospatial applications and reducing the validity of models that assume the locations are precise. A practical and efficient method is needed to improve coordinate precision. To address this need, the USDA Forest Service’s Remote Sensing Steering Committee has funded an applied research project to evaluate alternative methods that capitalize on lidar data availability to improve plot location precision....

DNR’s forest inventory group has completed its first version of a new remote-sensing based forest inventory system covering 1.4 million acres of DNR forest lands. We use a combination of field plots, lidar, NAIP, and a NAIP-derived canopy surface DSM. Given that height drives many key inventory variables (e.g. height, volume, biomass, carbon), remote-sensing derived height information provides a powerful tool to make fine scale inference about height related forest attributes. Predictions can also be aggregated to sub-stand, stand, or strata levels. Remote-sensing derived forest attributes...

Forested ecosystems are shaped by climate, soil and biotic interactions, resulting in constrained spatial distribution of species and biomes. Tolerance traits of species determine their fundamental ecological niche, while biotic interactions narrow tree distributions to the realized niche. In particular, shade, drought and waterlogging tolerances have been well-characterized at the species level in the Northern hemisphere tree species. Species distribution models explore fundamental niches and current geographic distributions with respect to environmental factors, but their ability to...

The state of Oregon recently invested in exploring options for increasing the extent of forest restoration activity. This initiative aims to reduce the incidence, effects, and expense of catastrophic fire events and restore economic stability to rural communities by enhancing the supply of raw materials for wood processing facilities and wood-based, renewable energy producers, particularly in the comparatively xeric, eastern two-thirds of the State. Collaborating with PNW-FIA and Portland State University, the Oregon Department of Forestry evaluated current levels of fire hazard as...

In many forest inventories, statistical models are employed to predict values for attributes that are difficult and/or time-consuming to measure. In some applications, models are applied across a large geographic area, which assumes the relationship between the response variable and predictors is ubiquitously invariable within the area. The extent to which this assumption holds for a tree height prediction model was evaluated at regional, ecoprovince, and ecosection spatial scales in the Northeastern United States. Two nonlinear regression models were tested, a spatially-ambiguous model...

Thousand cankers disease (TCD) is a new disease of black walnut (Juglans nigra L.) in the eastern United States. The disease is caused by the interaction of the aggressive bark beetle Pityophthorus juglandis Blackman and the canker-forming fungus, Geosmithia morbida M. Kolarik, E. Freeland, C. Utley & Tisserat, carried by the beetle. Other insects also colonize TCD-symptomatic trees and may also carry pathogens. A trap tree survey was conducted in Indiana and Missouri to characterize the assemblage of ambrosia beetles, bark beetles, and other weevils attracted to the main stems and crowns...

The canker pathogen Geosmithia morbida is known to be transmitted to Juglans species by the bark beetle Pityophthorus juglandis, and to lead to development of thousand cankers disease. In an Indiana-wide trap-tree survey of ambrosia and bark beetles and weevils colonizing stressed Juglans nigra, G. morbida was detected on three Stenomimus pallidus weevils emerged from two trees on one site. This is the first report of the pathogen in Indiana and the first report of the fungus from an insect species other than P. juglandis.

Urban forest strategies of gradually replacing high emitters of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) with low-emitting species are being considered as voluntary or emerging control measures for maintenance of the 8-h ozone standard in the Sacramento Federal Non-Attainment Area (SFNA). We describe a regulatory modeling study demonstrating the air-quality impacts of such measures as well as of strategies that increase net canopy cover. The results indicate that changing the mix of urban trees can improve air quality. The daily reductions in ozone resulting from species replacement...

The North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) project’s Attribution Team is completing nationwide processing of historic Landsat data to provide a comprehensive annual, wall-to-wall analysis of US disturbance history, with attribution, over the last 25+ years. Per-pixel time series analysis based on a new nonparametric curve fitting algorithm yields several metrics useful for elucidating causal processes underlying forest disturbance dynamics but requires CPU-intensive computation across large data sets (>4 billion pixels classified as forest in 434 Landsat scenes covering the conterminous...