Abstract
Forestland parcelization (i.e., a process by which large parcels of forestland ownership are divided into many small parcels) presents an increasing challenge to sustainable forest development in the United States. In Southeastern Ohio, forests also experienced intensive forestland parcelization, where the majority of forest owners own parcels smaller than 10 acres currently. To better understand the impact of forestland parcelization on forest development, this study employed multi-source remotely sensed data and land ownership data in Hocking County, Ohio to examine the relationship between forestland parcel size and forest attributes, including forest composition and structure. Our results show that private forestland parcels are generally smaller than public forestland (the average parcel sizes are 21.5 vs. 275.0 acres). Compared with private lands, public lands have higher values in all forest attributes, including forest coverage, abundance of oak-dominant stands, canopy height and aboveground biomass. A further investigation focusing on private forestland reveals that smaller parcels tend to have smaller forest coverage, less greenness, lower height and aboveground biomass, indicating that forests in smaller parcels may experience more human disturbances than larger parcels. The results also show that logarithmic models can well quantify the non-linear relationship between forest attributes and parcel size in the study area. Our study suggests that forestland parcelization indeed has negative effects on forest development, so it is very important to take appropriate measures to protect forests in small ownership parcels.
Highlights
According to the global land cover map derived from Landsat images [1], forests cover 28.35% of the world
To overcome the above-mentioned limitations of existing studies, this paper investigates the impact of land ownership parcel sizes on forest composition and structure in Southeastern Ohio using multi-source remotely sensed data
The forest coverage, peak-season Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), fall-season NDVI, tree height and aboveground biomass of public lands are significantly larger than those of private lands, and LiDAR intensity of public lands is significantly lower than private lands
Summary
According to the global land cover map derived from Landsat images [1], forests cover 28.35% of the world. In the United States, about 36% of the land area, or 816 million acres, is forest land [2]. Speeding-up forestland parcelization, defined as the subdivision of forest land holdings into smaller ownership parcels [4], is currently challenging sustainable forest development, especially for 49% of the national forestlands owned by non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners [5]. The increasing rate of forestland parcelization may be driven by economic and demographic factors, such as death, urbanization, and income structure [5,6]. This seriously affects Southeastern Ohio where 85% of the forestland is privately owned, and the majority of owners hold less than 10 acres
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