Biomass of trees sampled across Canada as part of the Energy from the Forest Biomass (ENFOR) Program

In the early 1980’s, thousands of trees were destructively sampled across Canada by the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) as part of the ENergy from the FORest research (ENFOR) program with the objective to produce regional biomass equations for the most common tree species. The sampling was overseen by researchers in each of the CFS’s five regional establishments.

In the early 2000’s, following a request by Canada’s National Forest Inventory, the original ENFOR data was recovered from regional archives, assembled and homogenized for the purpose of creating national biomass equations for Canada’s most common tree species. The equations were published in two installments. The first (Lambert et al, 2005), covered all of Canada except British Columbia for which the ENFOR data had not been recovered at the time of publication. The second (Ung et al, 2008), contains equations for the British Columbia-specific species, and modified equations for other Canadian tree species that had also been sampled in British Columbia. These publications also contain detailed information about the original tree sampling and sample processing and the original ENFOR reports.

This dataset contains the oven dry mass of four separate tree compartments for nearly 9,000 trees belonging to 33 different species. The four compartments are: stem wood, stem bark, branches, and foliage and twigs. Results of compilation, calculations and corrections are also contained in this dataset.