Treesearch

International forest product statistics contain measurement errors, missing values, and trade flow discrepancies. Our study presents a recursive dynamic goal programming approach to identify and reconcile these inconsistencies over the period from 2000 to 2022. Unlike traditional static reconciliation methods, this framework includes year-over-year consistency, optimizing deviations between reported and estimated values while adhering to technological constraints and trade balances. Results indicate substantial regional heterogeneity: Europe and North America exhibit high reported–reconcile...

Forecasting corn yields with precision across diverse weather zones is vital to supporting food supply resilience and sustainable agriculture. We introduce a data-integrated modeling framework applied across the Greater Mississippi River Basin- one of the largest corn-producing regions in the United States. Using MODIS-based NDVI time series, historical meteorological data, and spatial crop coverage, we investigate the relationships between vegetation health indicators and corn yields under varying climatic conditions. A new vegetative metric is introduced to enhance correlation with yield...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Tennessee. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all...

Climate models predict future increases in the frequency, magnitude, and duration of natural hazard events, including heat waves, droughts, and wildfires. People may be aware of these natural hazards but unfamiliar with new patterns expected under climate change. Ideally, people would take action to protect themselves from natural hazard events—even those with which they have limited prior experience. Doing so would likely reduce the public costs of later assisting individuals impacted by events when they occur. Although a large body of research has examined how people perceive and protect...

During periods of heightened wildland fire activity in the United States, multiagency coordinating groups must prioritize among multiple on-going fires to allocate scarce suppression resources. While many studies have explored factors that influence wildfire suppression expenditures and personnel allocation, understanding the specific factors that affect daily wildfire prioritization has remained unexplored. In this study, we first examine wildfire reporting and ranking processes across different regions of the United States to provide insight into criteria used for fire ranking. We then...

Rapid, well-coordinated aerial response can limit wildfire growth during the initial response (IR) period. Most quantitative studies of wildland fire aviation effectiveness have relied on aircraft data from the United States Forest Service (USFS), with comparatively less attention to other agencies. This study leverages open ADS-B data to reconstruct second-by-second aircraft movements for both the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) and USFS fleets during the 2020 California fire season, enabling the first direct cross-agency comparison of operational use. We...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station hosted a 2-day regional biomass workshop in May 2022, with the objective of reviewing recent developments, trends, and opportunities in biomass utilization. Day 1 focused on recent research, and Day 2 focused on biomass success stories from practitioners and business owners. About 120 attendees participated in this virtual event.Effective biomass utilization—from forest residues, wood products residues, and thinned or sustainably harvested stands—is one tool that managers have to help mitigate wildfire...

Hurricanes are increasingly frequent and intense disturbances that cause substantial economic and ecological damage to forested landscapes worldwide. Following such events, multiple stakeholders – including timberland owners, forest management organizations, logging and transportation providers, and wood-processing mills – face urgent salvage decisions under uncertain and spatially heterogeneous timber supply conditions. This study presents a scenario-based stochastic optimization framework for post-hurricane salvage logging that explicitly accounts for uncertainty in timber volume loss...

This report assesses the risks from N and S deposition on 198 herbaceous plant species of the continental United States. Information for each species has been compiled from several peer-reviewed Federal and non-Federal sources. Seventy-one species are featured in detail. For each featured species, we provide information on seven topics: the (1) distribution and conservation status, (2) species characteristics and habitat, (3) wildlife and livestock uses, (4) other ecosystem services, (5) traditional ecological knowledge, (6) responses to N and S deposition, climate, soil pH, including...

Accurately predicting water table dynamics is vital for sustaining groundwater resources, ecological functions, and anthropogenic activities. This study evaluates autoregressive model with a) prediction under sparsity assumption within model coefficients, b) allows lags present in both dependent and independent variables for estimating daily water table depth using hydroclimatic data from the USDA Forest Service Santee Experimental Forest (SC) and D1 (NC). Data from 2006–2019 (SC) and 1988–2008 (NC) were used, with predictors including soil and air temperature, precipitation, wind, and...