Treesearch

The relationships between biodiversity, carbon, forests and people are complex and interdependent. Reducing the rates of global deforestation and forest degradation will yield substantial gains for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Under appropriate conditions, it could also achieve significant social and economic gains. The degree to which these goals are met through a mechanism such as REDD+ will depend on the specific policies and practices employed. Should biodiversity and human well-being not be given sufficient consideration, there is a very real risk that...

REDD+ actions should be based on the best science and on the understanding that forests can provide more than a repository for carbon but also offer a wide range of services beneficial to people. Biodiversity underpins many ecosystem services, one of which is carbon sequestration, and individual species’ functional traits play an important role in determining ecological processes. Higher levels of biodiversity generally support greater levels of ecosystem service production than lower levels, and ecosystem properties, such as resilience, are important considerations when managing human-modi...

Knowledge, both of the historical range of spruce-dominated forests and associated site conditions, is needed by land managers to help define restoration goals and potential sites for restoration. We used an existing digital database of witness trees listed in deeds from 1752 to 1899 to compare characteristics of red spruce (Picea rubens Sarg.) sites to non-red spruce sites to gain an understanding of historical spruce-dominated forests in West Virginia. The analysis revealed that red spruce witness trees were found at significantly higher elevations than non-spruce witness trees across...

Forest restoration and fuel reduction treatments have been widely applied in the western United States with the purpose of reducing the size and intensity of wildfires. However, the low value of small-diameter trees produced from such treatments has partly constrained the ability to treat all the areas identified as being in need of treatments. The objective of this study was to analyze the potential for log sort yards to increase the residual value of forest restoration treatments relative to a standard sort at landing in Ravalli County, Montana. We simulated log handing and transportation...

In the past, the goal of forest inventory was to determine the extent of the timber resource. Predictions of how the resource was changing were made by comparing differences between successive inventories. The general view of the associated sample design included selection probabilities based on land area observed at a discrete point in time. That is, time was not considered part of the sample design because it was not considered an element of the sampled population. Over the last few decades, the general goal of Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) has been changing to monitoring the...

The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program's panel system, in which 10-20 percent of the sample is measured in any given year, is designed to increase the currency of FIA reporting and its sensitivity to factors operating at relatively fine temporal scales. Now that much of the country has completed at least one measurement cycle over all panels, there is an immediate need for estimation strategies which make the best use of this sampling schedule. A primary obstacle is that only a fraction of plots can be considered current in any particular year. This leaves the analyst with a...

Meaningful integration of National Forest Inventory field plot information with spectral imagery acquired from satellite or airborne platforms requires precise plot registration. Global positioning system-based plot registration procedures, such as the one employed by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program, yield plot coordinates that, although adequate for some purposes, often contain substantial error. Conversely, the registration of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data is accurate and precise. Considering the proliferation of high density LiDAR data, there is potential to...

The use of Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plot data for producing continuous and thematic maps of forest attributes (e.g., forest type, canopy cover, volume, and biomass) at the regional level from satellite imagery can be challenging due to differences in scale. Specifically, classification errors that may result from assumptions made between what the field data represent and what the corresponding spectral information of the image pixels depict. This investigation aimed at determining whether image objects derived from Landsat TM imagery can be used as an alternative to a 3 by 3...