Treesearch

The USDA Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program, the United States’ national forest inventory operating since 1928, has undergone two independent Blue Ribbon Panel (BRP) reviews (1991–92, 1997–98) that drove major improvements, including the transition toward a nationally consistent annualized inventory system and integration of forest health monitoring. Today, FIA faces unprecedented demands from data-driven markets, intensifying disturbances, supply chain volatility, and sustainability frameworks requiring verified, frequently updated data at sub-county scales...

The extension of NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission beyond the cryosphere to include the study of vegetation and the land surface has significantly advanced global Earth observation. This review synthesizes findings from 293 peer-reviewed articles and provides a comprehensive assessment of the mission’s contributions to terrestrial ecosystem science. We begin by outlining the mission’s objectives, instrumentation, and core data products—particularly ATL03 (geolocated photons) and ATL08 (terrain and canopy heights)—which have supported a wide array of...

Background. Mapping surface and ground fuels is key to predicting fire behavior and effects. Remote sensing effectively describes tree canopy attributes, but it is less effective for surface and ground fuels because they are partially obscured by vegetation. Aims. We mapped duff loads by leveraging the coupled relationship between canopy, surface and ground fuels: canopy fuels provide the source material for surface fuels, which serve as the material for duff formation. Methods. We mapped annual surface fuel production from tree components that contribute to duff formation using airborne...

Forest insects and pathogens, in addition to fire, contribute to structural diversity by creating snags (dead trees) and dead tops on live trees or “topkill” in conifers throughout western North America. Snags and top-killed trees are important sources of wildlife habitat but quantifying their presence can be challenging at broad scales. Multiple approaches for detecting snags have been developed, but limited methods exist for detecting topkill via remote sensing. There is a need to monitor overlapping disturbances across time and space in addition to the structural diversity in mature and...

Climate change is expected to alter fire return intervals in cold and wet forests in the northwestern United States. This coupled with an expected rise in prescribed fires to restore healthy forests, disproportionately increases risk to saplings of tree species adapted to colder and wetter environments that have low fire resistance. To assess this potential impact, we evaluated the impacts of increasing fire intensity on Picea engelmannii and Thuja plicata sapling physiology, morphology, and mortality. This was achieved using established pyro-ecophysiology experiments where saplings were...

The Raster Tools Python package provides an application programmers interface (API) for building raster data processing pipelines. Pipelines built with Raster Tools can efficiently process extremely large raster datasets, including those larger than the system’s available memory. Raster Tools can be deployed on systems ranging from small laptops to high performance computing environments. To aid in the construction of raster processing pipelines, Raster Tools provides a consistent API to a suite of scalable and lazy raster processing functions including focal, zonal, clipping, convolution,...

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 Kansas. 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 the...

Today, we hear a great deal about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it is changing society. Every time we search for something on our computers, buy something over the internet, take a picture on our phone, ask Google where to eat, get mapping directions, or search for a phone number, we are knowingly, and often unknowingly, using AI. But what exactly is AI and how is it being used within forestry?

Reducing fuels in overly dense, arid forests of the Western US is a prominent fire mitigation strategy. Fuel treatments, including thinning and prescribed burning, are a means of reintroducing fire to fire-dependent forests and alleviating wildfire-related damages to human health, infrastructure and natural resources.To help establish economic efficiency analysis of fuel treatments, we provide a methodological framework illustrating benefit-cost analysis (BCA) and considerations for dealing with valuation complexity.Our framework was developed from research reviews and valuation discussions...

Wildfire risk mitigation on private property is central to reducing community wildfire vulnerability. Homeowners have control over many of the key factors that contribute to wildfire risk on their parcels, yet vulnerable conditions persist. One potential explanation is a misalignment between homeowners’ and trained assessors’ perceptions of parcel-level wildfire risk. Prior research has documented a “risk gap” in a single community wherein owners often underestimate their parcel-level wildfire risk; however, it is unclear whether such misalignments are widespread. This study replicates and...