Understory

For more than 90 years, the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has played an integral role in providing information vital to the management and conservation of the Nation’s forest resources. Nearly all major decisions regarding the Nation’s forests have been made with reference to and reliance on FIA findings and forest resource evaluations. Although FIA began as a timber inventory, today FIA provides authoritative data about forest carbon, forest products and services, biomass availability, economic development o...

Forest Service researchers, working in close partnership with Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management leadership, are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to advance knowledge and tools that improve operations before, during, and after wildfires. Forest Service scientists partner with Microsoft, Google, the Department of Defense and many other technology providers to develop new innovations that are freely available and rapidly applied to today’s firefighting response—upholding a model that is less costly, more efficient, and more innovative than what the private sector alo...

A Climate Resilience Guide for Urban Forestsin the Northwestexplains the potential effects of climate change on Northwest urban forests and discuss strategies thaturbanplanners,foresters,and arborists can implement to ensure the long-term sustainability of community tree canopies.AninteractiveExcelspreadsheetoftree species and cultivarscommonly available for urban plantings inIdaho, Oregon, and Washington is also available to accompany the Urban Forest Guide.This database canbe usedto help evaluate thesuitabilityofdifferent speciesfor a given region within the three statesbased oncharacteristi...

This document lists the questions asked in the seventh cycle of the National Woodland Owner Survey. We sent printed versions of this survey to woodland owners in the United States between 2019-2023. There may be slight variation in questions among states.Access other versions of the National Woodland Owner Survey, including state variations, past cycles, and versions of the survey for urban, corporate, and island woodland owners.

People and ecosystems throughout the West depend on snowmelt to replenish groundwater, waterways, and soil moisture. Snow droughts occurs when snowpack is abnormally low, relative to the time of year and location. This type of drought can have significant economic and ecological effects. This fact sheet, part of the Drought in the West fact sheet series, explains the two types of snow drought, gives more details about their effects, and offers additional resources.

Northwest forests are home to many species of native insects that live in and feed on trees. These insects thin old, stressed, or sick trees and diversify forest structure. Under certain conditions, forest insects can also cause significant tree mortality when their populations expand in an outbreak. This fact sheet summarizes the conditions that effect insect outbreaks, highlights two prominent species, and presents some general considerations for managing insect outbreaks.This sheet was produced as a partnership between the Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center and the USDA...

The Forest Service has three primary mechanisms for gathering data about forest conditions and health at the landscape scale: Aerial detection surveys, the plot-based inventories, and satellite remote sensing analysis. This fact sheet summarizes these three data sources, and introduces an ongoing project to integrate multiple data sources in order to take advantage of their unique strengths.

As part of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, the Forest Service and its partners are using silviculture and prescribed fire to restore historical forest structure and composition in the northern Blue Mountains of Oregon and Washington within the Wallowa-Whitman and Umatilla National Forests. To monitor restoration effects, this project combines noninvasive methods (trail cameras and audio recording units) with traditional wildlife sampling techniques (nest checks and telemetry) to measure wildlife responses to forest restoration treatments. These data provide landscape-sc...

These tutorials are provided to teach the basics of using FOFEM, including creating reports, summaries and graphs, and interpreting results.