‘FIESTA': a forest inventory estimation and analysis R package

Abstract

Ecologists are increasingly relying on national forest inventories to address a wide variety of issues. The ‘FIESTA' R package (Forest Inventory ESTimation and Analysis) is a tool that enables customized investigations using the extensive sample‐based inventory data collected across all lands in the US by the US Dept of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program. To date, the complex nature of the FIA inventory constrains many users to conduct only limited analyses through existing tools with pre‐specified geographic boundaries, timeframes, and auxiliary data under a single statistical estimation process. Yet, the rapid evolution of available remotely sensed data and statistical methods present the opportunity to conduct spatial and temporal analyses of forest attributes that are much more relevant to many pressing ecological, environmental, economic, and social issues in the US, The ‘FIESTA' package was developed to augment the current set of available tools by providing a flexible platform that accommodates evolving technologies and leading‐edge estimation techniques. The package contains a collection of functions that can query FIA databases, summarize sample‐based inventory data, extract and aggregate auxiliary spatial data, and generate estimates with associated variances. The ‘FIESTA' R package is available on CRAN (https://cran.r‐project.org/package=FIESTA).