Abstract
Forests in the United States are managed by multiple public and private entities making harmonization of available data and subsequent mapping of management challenging. We mapped four important types of forest management, production, ecological, passive, and preservation, at 250-meter spatial resolution in the Southeastern (SEUS) and Pacific Northwest (PNW) USA. Both ecologically and socio-economically dynamic regions, the SEUS and PNW forests represent, respectively, 22.0% and 10.4% of forests in the coterminous US. We built a random forest classifier using seasonal time-series analysis of 16 years of MODIS 16-day composite Enhanced Vegetation Index, and ancillary data containing forest ownership, roads, US Forest Service wilderness and forestry areas, proportion conifer and proportion riparian. The map accuracies for SEUS are 89% (10-fold cross-validation) and 67% (external validation) and PNW are 91% and 70% respectively with the same validation. The now publicly available forest management maps, probability surfaces for each management class and uncertainty layer for each region can be viewed and analysed in commercial and open-source GIS and remote sensing software.
Highlights
Background & SummaryForests cover about a third of land area in the coterminous United States (US), with the largest tracts of forest land managed by the federal government for preservation or multiple uses[1]
While the effects of management on forests are well-studied at the stand to larger management units such as a national forest scale[4], little is known about how socioeconomics, land use, and management decisions influence forest ecology across landscapes larger than national forest boundaries such as regions and continents[4]
We built a random forest (RF) classifier[13] to classify management types using a combination of trends, seasonality, and phenological pattern derived from the Breaks For Additive Seasonal and Trend (BFAST) algorithm analysis[14] of the MODIS EVI
Summary
Forests cover about a third of land area in the coterminous United States (US), with the largest tracts of forest land managed by the federal government for preservation or multiple uses[1]. The interaction of forest policy with land-use and economic priorities has created a mosaic of forest management types in both the SEUS and the PNW. These can be simplified into four management types9: 1) production forestry, 2) ecological forestry, 3) passive management, and 4) preservation management. Managed forests are those that are largely left alone apart from occasional harvest driven by economic need or opportunity by the landowner These include naturally regenerating forests without specific apparent management plans, which often have mixed uses, e.g. hunting or recreation areas. Management practices exclude harvesting but often involve prescribed fire, invasive species removal, and the planting of species to manage ecosystem composition
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