Threats to Private Forest Land in the USA

Susan M. Stein and Ronald E. McRoberts

USDA Forest Service Cooperative Forestry Staff (1) and North Central Research Station (2)

The Forests on the Edge project, sponsored by the USDA Forest Service, has conducted a comprehensive, national assessment of the contributions of private forest land to water quality and timber production and an assessment of the threats to these lands due to urbanization, fire, and ozone.  The objective has been to identify and rank watersheds across the USA with respect to their water quality and timber contributions and with respect to the threats to their continuing and future contributions.  The project objective is particularly relevant in the context of the increasing emphasis on forest sustainability and the Montreal Process criteria and indicators.  For example, Montreal Process Criterion 2, Maintenance of the Productive Capacity of Forest Ecosystems, includes the area of productive forest land as an indicator, and Criterion 4, Conservation of Soil and Water Resources, includes area of forest land managed for watershed protection functions as an indicator.  The project methodology has emphasized construction of nationally consistent maps of relevant natural resource attributes and the use of geographic information system techniques to integrate map information. 

The presentation focuses on two aspects of the study: first, a synthesis of the methodological lessons learned, and second, specific spatial results.  First, because the study is national in scope, construction of nationally consistent maps was crucial.  This requirement necessitated locating such maps in a format that could be easily imported for GIS analyses.  If maps were not available, then it was necessary to construct them from data having the scope, breadth, consistency, and uniformity necessary for the application.  In most cases, the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the USDA Forest Service was the only source of such data.  Because of time and resource limitations, map construction entailed imputing sample means to spatially regular polygons.  Multiple GIS techniques for integrating maps depicting a combination of natural resource, political, and abiotic attributes were considered with the simple GIS intersection technique being selected.  Finally, comments are provided on the efforts necessary to coordinate the cross-agency, multiple location effort. 

The second aspect addresses the specific spatial assessment results.  The analyses suggest the possibility of serious threats to contributions of private forest land to water quality from urbanization in the Southeast and New England and threats to timber production from urbanization in the Southeast and New England, from fire in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest, and from ozone in the mid-Atlantic region.

Land Session - Wednesday Afternoon

corresponding author:

Susan M. Stein
Cooperative Forestry Staff
USDA Forest Service
Mail Stop 1123
Washington, DC 20250
202-205-0837
sstein@fs.fed.us