Treesearch

Wildlife species have diverse and sometimes conflicting habitat requirements. To support diverse wildlife communities, natural resource managers need to manage for a variety of habitats across a large area and to create long-term management plans to ensure this variety is maintained. In these efforts, managers would benefit from assessments of potential climate and land use change effects on habitats. As part of the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Forest Futures Project (NFFP), we assessed climate and land use driven changes in the areas of forest (≥66% canopy cover) and woodland (66% >...

Site productivity (SP) is the inherent capacity to grow crops of industrial wood. SP identifies the potential growth in cubic feet/acre/year and is based on the culmination of mean annual increment of fully stocked natural stands. Changes in SP were summarized for timberland and the associated effects on net growth and removal estimates were investigated using data from the Forest Inventory and Analysis program from the early to late 2000s. Change in area by SP class ranged from 4.8 to 19.6 percent, depending on the state. Actual changes on the ground are not this common. Net growth...

The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations conducted a global assessment for forest change in 2010 using satellite imagery from 1990, 2000, and 2005. The U.S. Forest Service was responsible for assessing forest change in the United States. A polygon-based, stratified sampling design developed by FAO was used to assess change in forest area within 10 km by 10 km tiles at every 1° from 1990, 2000, and 2006 using Landsat TM and ETM+ data. The assessment included: 1) mapping land cover (tree and non-tree) and land use (forest and nonforest) within these tiles for each...

The Image-based Change Estimation (ICE) project resulted from the need to provide estimates and information for land cover and land use change over large areas. The procedure uses Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plot locations interpreted using two different dates of imagery from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP). In order to determine a suitable project workflow, interpretation methods and database options were explored. The results provide useful information for the change occurring between land cover and land use types across two prototype landscapes.

The growth to removals ratio (G/R) is often used as a measure of forest resource sustainability and as a reference point to forecast future resource sustainability. However, little work has been done to determine if any relationship exists between G/R over time. Forest Inventory and Analysis data for 12 southern states were used to determine if any relationship exists between G/R at a given point in time and G/R in the future. Ordinary least squares results indicated a positive relationship over time, meaning a high G/R ratio in the past is associated with a high G/R ratio in the future....

Currently in its third phase, the North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) project has launched nationwide processing of historic Landsat data to provide a comprehensive annual, wall-to-wall analysis of U.S. disturbance history over the last 30+ years. Because understanding the cause of disturbance is important to quantifying carbon dynamics, work is underway to attribute causal agents to these nationwide change maps. Developing empirical models of the diverse causal agents in this country involves many decisions. Alternative response designs (such as varying size, shape, quantity, and level...

The EVALIDator Web application, developed in 2007, provides estimates and sampling errors for many user selected forest statistics from the Forest Inventory and Analysis Database (FIADB). Among the statistics estimated are forest area, number of trees, biomass, volume, growth, removals, and mortality. A new release of EVALIDator, developed in 2012, has an option to select two statistics and generate a ratio estimate of the pair. The new feature can estimate statistics such as volume or growth per acre or the growth to removals ratio. Also, the program now makes county choropleth maps of...

FIESTA (Forest Inventory Estimation for Analysis) is a user-friendly R package that supports the production of estimates for forest resources based on procedures from Bechtold and Patterson (2005). The package produces output consistent with current tools available for the Forest Inventory and Analysis National Program, such as FIDO (Forest Inventory Data Online) and EVALIDator. FIESTA was developed as an alternative data retrieval and reporting tool that is functional within the R environment, allowing customized applications and compatibility with other R-based analyses. FIESTA generates...

The estimation of area change between two FIA inventories is complicated by the "mapping" of subplots. Subplots can be subdivided or mapped into forest and nonforest conditions, and forest conditions can be further mapped based on distinct changes in reserved status, owner group, forest type, stand-size class, regeneration status, and stand density. The boundaries of these mapped conditions may change from one inventory to the next, resulting in complex geometries when the two sets of boundaries are combined. The SUBP_COND_CHNG_MTRX (CMX) table was added in version 4.0 of the FIADB to...

We are using Forest Inventory and Analysis data to examine evidence for tree responses to climate change. By comparing seedling and tree occurrence data, we found that there is not yet evidence that tree populations in the eastern half of the United States are shifting geographic ranges to higher latitude in response to warming temperature. We are developing novel statistical methods to quantify seedling abundance in relation to climate and biotic variables, and to compare seedling and tree responses. We summarize how combining abundance data for seedlings and trees is allowing us to...