Collins Pine and FIA Comparison

The overwhelming majority of information on historical forest conditions
in the western North America comes from public lands, which may provide an
incomplete description of historical landscapes. Historical data
from privately-owned lands could help inform large-scale forest
restoration efforts across ownerships. In this study we made use of an
archive containing extensive timber survey data collected in the early
1920’s from privately owned forestland. We then used contemporary
FIA data to compare changes in tree density, basal area, and pine
dominance with historical conditions. With this dataset provided,
we subset FIA data from plots within the region of our historical timber
inventory that showed similar biophysical environments as our
historical dataset. The climatic and topographic data provided here were
extracted from those FIA plots and from the locations of the historical
timber survey. We subsequently used those extractions in random
forest modeling and regression tree analysis to produce our final results
reported in our manuscrip. Our specific objectives with this study were
(1) describe the range of historical forest conditions across the survey
area and compare that to contemporary forest conditions,
(2) investigate the influence of biophysical factors on observed
variability in historical and contemporary forest conditions and (3)
predict historical forest conditions across a large spatial domain using
modeled relationships with biophysical variables.