Statistics and quality assurance for the Northern Research Station Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, 2016

Abstract

The U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program collects sample plot data on all forest ownerships across the United States. FIA's primary objective is to determine the extent, condition, volume, growth, and use of trees on the Nation's forest land through a comprehensive inventory and analysis of the Nation's forest resources. The FIA program strives for transparency by making the methods and results of the inventory and analysis available to the public. The standard for distributing FIA data is the FIADatabase (FIADB). FIADB data for individual states can be downloaded from the FIA DataMart at https://www. fia.fs.fed.us/tools-data/ as Microsoft Access© databases, which can be used to generate estimates of forest area, number of trees, volume, biomass, growth, removals, and mortality. This report complements the Northern Research Station's FIA 5-year state reports beginning with the 2014 inventory and includes detailed information on forest inventory methods, important resource statistics, quality of estimates, and key references.

Michigan Forests 2014

“…Detailed information on forest inventory methods, data quality estimates, and important resource statistics can be found in Gormanson et al 2017. This site also has most of the data used in this report accessible through EvaliDator (requires Microsoft Access The Upper Peninsula of Michigan accounts for only 29 percent of the land in Michigan but has 45 percent of the forest land (4.2 and 5.0 million acres for eastern and western Upper Peninsula, respectively).…”

“…For the sake of consistency, a new, national plot design was implemented by all five regional FIA units in 1999 (Gormanson et al 2017). Prior to this new plot design, fixed and variable-radius subplots were used in the 1980 and 1993 inventories.…”

Forests of South Dakota, 2016

“…Change variables, such as net growth, removals, and mortality are based on 8,260 samples collected in 2006-2011 and resampled in 2011-2016. See Bechtold and Patterson (2005), O'Connell et al (2014), and Gormanson et al (2017) for definitions and technical details.…”

Wisconsin Forests 2014

“…Unless indicated otherwise, sampling errors reported in text and figures represent one standard error (SE). For information on sampling errors, see "Statistics and Quality Assurance for the Northern Research Station Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, 2016" (Gormanson et al 2017), which is available at https://doi.org/10.2737/NRS-GTR-166.…”

“…Abiotic stressors include drought, flooding, cold temperatures or freeze injury, nutrient deficiencies, the physical properties of soils that affect moisture and aeration, and toxic pollutants. Crown dieback is collected in the summer on a subset of P2 plots (see Gormanson et al 2017 for explanation of P2 plots). Crown dieback is defined as recent mortality of branches with fine twigs and reflects the severity of recent stresses on a tree.…”