Toward spatio-temporal models to support national-scale forest carbon monitoring and reporting

National forest inventory (NFI) programs provide vital information on forest parameters’ status, trend, and change. Most NFI designs and estimation methods are tailored to estimate status over large areas but are not well suited to estimate trend and change, especially over small spatial areas and/or over short time periods (e.g. annual estimates). Fine-scale space-time indexed estimates are critical to a variety of environmental, ecological, and economic monitoring efforts. In the United States, for example, NFI data are used to estimate forest carbon status, trend, and change to support national, state, and local user group needs. Increasingly, these users seek finer spatial and temporal scale estimates to evaluate existing land use policies and management practices, and inform future activities. Here we propose a spatio-temporal Bayesian small area estimation modeling framework that delivers statistically valid estimates with complete uncertainty quantification for status, trend, and..., , , # Data from: Toward spatio-temporal models to support national-scale forest carbon monitoring and reporting Here we provide the simulated and FIA datasets along with R code to fit candidate models and provide model output summaries. ## Simulated datasets conus_pop_plots.tar.gz is the compressed conus_pop_plots.csv file that holds plot-level population values. Columns are: * *state*: State name. * *county*: County name. * *fips*: State and county code. * *ha*: County hectare. * *poly_id*: Unique county code. * *pop_id*: Unique plot code. * *tcc_2008 - tcc_2021*: NLCD tree canopy cover (%) by year. * *n_2008 - n_2021*: Number of plots in the county by year. * *carbon_2008 - carbon_2021*: Simulated carbon values (Mg/ha) by year. * *geometry*: Simple feature point coordinates. conus_pop_counties.csv is a file that holds county-level population values computed from conus_pop_plots.csv. Columns are: * *state*: State name. * *county*: County name. * *fips*: State and county code. * *ha*:...,