I dedicate a significant portion of my time to working with data, recognizing its critical role in informed decision-making and transparent public policy discussions. In the forest industry, we are fortunate to benefit from the USDA Forest Service’s Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA) program, which provides essential insights through accurate and timely data.

According to their website:

“For nearly 100 years, the FIA program has been recognized as a world leader in conducting national-scale forest inventories.  FIA information is widely used to address local and regional issues related to trends in forest extent, health and productivity; land cover and land use change; and the changing demographics of private forest landowners.”[i]

The FIA “is a congressionally mandated program that delivers current, consistent, and credible information about the status of forests and forest resources within the U.S. by continually collecting and analyzing data about these forests and the values they provide.” [ii]

The FIA is often described as the nation’s “census of trees.”  That’s not quite right – in a census, you are trying to count every individual – imagine measuring and inventorying every tree on forestland in the United States.  The FIA is instead a statistically valid sampling, allowing us to understand what is occurring across the landscape without checking every tree.  The FIA collects data annually from a subset of permanent plots on a grid density of approximately one plot for every 6,500 acres of timberland. A complete re‐inventory of all plots or “cycle” occurs every 5 to 10 years, depending upon the state.

As you might imagine, the FIA dataset is enormous, and FIA has created a number of tools that allow users to filter access to this data to meet their needs[iii].  While these tools don’t always meet today’s expectations of “User Interface,” a little time on any tool will let you answer a broad range of questions related to the forest resource.

I have a strong preference for EVALIDator, a powerful tool that enables users to query a nationwide database of over 130,000 plots with precision. It offers a range of filters to help refine searches and retrieve the most relevant data efficiently.  Available filters include[iv]:

• Geography (state, county, radius from a location, congressional district, etc.)
• Whether to use plots just from timberland or from all forestland (which will include some areas with legal or other restrictions on timber harvesting);
• Tree volume, tree number, annual growth, annual removals, and annual mortality (plus variations of many of these);
• Diameter class, slope, distance to a road, elevation, forest type, ownership type, species, species group, and many others.

While individual landowners may have inventory data that tells them about their own holdings, FIA is the gold standard when it comes to information across a broader landscape – counties, a state, a region, or nationally.  It can help inform business decisions (e.g., is there enough softwood within a 60-mile radius of a pulp mill to increase softwood utilization while maintaining the forest resource?), public policy discussions (e.g., what happens to forest carbon stocks following a fire?), and public understanding of the forest (e.g., are we growing more than we are harvesting in region x?).

Over the next year, FRA will be using its Woods to Mill to discuss ways to use the FIA dataset, as well as associated information on forest industry production and private landowners. 

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[i] https://research.fs.usda.gov/programs/fia

[ii] https://research.fs.usda.gov/programs/fia#overview

[iii] https://research.fs.usda.gov/programs/fia#data-and-tools

[iv] This is a sampling of available filters and not begin to provide a full set of options available to the user.