Integrating urban and national forest inventory data in support of rural-urban assessments
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined methods for combining these two data sources using data from an urban inventory conducted in Austin, Texas, USA, and NFI data collected in the same and surrounding areas.
Abstract: Due to the interest in status and trends in forest resources, many countries conduct a national forest inventory (NFI) To better understand the characteristics of woody vegetation in areas that are typically not forested, there is an increasing emphasis on urban inventory efforts where all trees both within and outside forest areas are measured Often, these two inventories are entirely independent endeavours from data collection through analytical reporting To holistically explore landscape-scale phenomena across the rural-urban gradient, there is a need to combine information from both sources In this paper, methods for combining these two data sources are examined using data from an urban inventory conducted in Austin, Texas, USA, and NFI data collected in the same and surrounding areas Approaches to aggregating areas based on sampling intensity and plot design combinations are of considerable importance for the validity of the estimation An additional complexity can also arise due to temporal discrepancies between the two data sources Thus, it is imperative to accurately identify all the existing sampling intensity/plot design combinations within the population of interest Once this difficulty is surmounted, there still exist aggregation methods that will produce erroneous results Statistically valid variance estimation arises from maintaining independence of the two samples This approach satisfies both the proportional allocation among strata requirement as well as the necessary partitioning of the two plot designs Difficulty in interpretation of results can also be encountered due to differences in measurement protocols across aggregated areas Thus, analysts should have an in-depth understanding of data sources and the differences between them to avoid unintended errors The need for rural-urban assessments are expected to increase dramatically as urban areas expand and issues such as land conversion, wildland fire and invasive species spread become of further importance
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TL;DR: The United States Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program has been monitoring national forest resources in the United States for over 80 years; presented here is a synthesis of research applica... as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The United States Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program has been monitoring national forest resources in the United States for over 80 years; presented here is a synthesis of research applica...
64 citations
Cites background from "Integrating urban and national fore..."
...Recent work is investigating ways of merging these datasets for rural– urban landscape assessments (Westfall et al. 2018)....
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TL;DR: In this paper, a review of 98 articles on urban tree inventories were examined, with the primary focus being sampling design, and a governance arrangement approach was applied to identify the policy-making arrangements behind the inventories.
Abstract: Urban trees provide important ecosystem services, across ownership and governance structures, and tree inventories are an important tool enabling urban foresters and green space managers to monitor and perform the sustainable management of urban trees. For optimal management of urban trees, a better understanding is needed concerning how urban tree inventories can provide long-term monitoring overviews across administrative borders, and how inventory protocols should be adapted to address specific practitioner issues. In this review, 98 articles on urban tree inventories were examined, the primary focus being sampling design. A governance arrangement approach was applied to identify the policy-making arrangements behind the inventories. Stratification is commonly used in the sampling design, despite being problematic for long-term representativeness. Only 10% of the stratification sampling designs identified were considered as having long-term validity. The studies frequently relied on an individual sampling design aimed at a particular issue, as opposed to using an existing longitudinal sampling network. Although private trees can constitute over 50% of the urban tree population, 41% of the studies reviewed did not include private trees at all. Urban tree inventories focused primarily on tree data on a local scale. Users or private tree owners are commonly not included in these studies, and limited attention is paid to economic, cultural or social factors. A long-term validation of sampling methods in urban areas, and a multi-lateral approach to tree inventories, are needed to maintain long-term operational value for local managers in securing ecosystem service provisions for entire urban forests.
12 citations
Food and Agriculture Organization1, Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests2, University of Melbourne3, United States Forest Service4, University of Chittagong5, Rangamati Science and Technology University6, Khulna University7, University of Queensland8, United Nations9, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University10, University of Dhaka11, United States Agency for International Development12, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology13, Macquarie University14, Bangladesh Forest Research Institute15
TL;DR: The Bangladesh Forest Inventory (BFI) as mentioned in this paper was designed and implemented through three components: biophysical inventory, socio-economic survey and remote sensing-based land cover mapping, which is a multipurpose, efficient, accurate and replicable national forest assessment.
11 citations
TL;DR: In response to the strategic plan required by the Agricultural Act of 2014, the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program is initiating a strategic inventory of the nation's urban forests as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In response to the strategic plan required by the Agricultural Act of 2014, the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program is initiating a strategic inventory of the nation’s urban forests. The inventory is designed to provide timely and credible data on urban forests, thereby meeting an expanding need for information on trees located in communities where more than 80% of people live. The program monitors the status and trends of trees in urban settings (i.e., urban forests), enabling assessment of their composition and structure, ecosystem services and values, health, and risk from pests and disease. At full implementation with funding, resources, and partnerships in place, the program as designed would provide annual updates of urban forest conditions on approximately 68 million acres of land and for 100 of the most populous cities in the United States. The traditional forestland inventory of FIA continues and is complemented by the new urban inventory providing the means for a more complete assessment of the tree and forest resources across the United States.
10 citations
23 Dec 2022
4 citations
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2,530 citations
"Integrating urban and national fore..." refers methods in this paper
...To create strata, the distribution of the NLCD crown cover per cent (Homer et al., 2015) was examined and crown cover classes were delineated based on natural breaks in the distribution and to ensure a minimum of 10 plots per stratum (Westfall et al....
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...Due to the number of zeros in the data, a zero-inflated gamma model (El-Shaarawi and Piegorsch, 2002) was chosen and the predictor variable was crown cover assigned to each plot from the NLCD map product (Homer et al., 2015)....
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TL;DR: Urban forests in the north central, northeast, south central and southeast regions of the USA store and sequester the most carbon, with average carbon storage per hectare greatest in southeast, northcentral, northeast and Pacific northwest regions, respectively.
1,205 citations
"Integrating urban and national fore..." refers background in this paper
...However, it was not until the 1990s that all-land urban inventories were initiated in some US cities (Nowak and Crane, 2002)....
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TL;DR: The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service is in the process of moving from a system of quasiindependent, regional, periodic inventories to an enhanced program featuring greater national consistency, annual measurement of a proportion of plots in each State, new reporting requirements, and integration with the ground sampling component of the Forest Health Monitoring Program as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Addendum: The supplementary documents referenced in this manuscript are posted on the Web site https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/sampling/index.phpThe Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service is in the process of moving from a system of quasiindependent, regional, periodic inventories to an enhanced program featuring greater national consistency, annual measurement of a proportion of plots in each State, new reporting requirements, and integration with the ground sampling component of the Forest Health Monitoring Program. This documentation presents an overview of the conceptual changes, explains the three phases of FIA's sampling design, describes the sampling frame and plot configuration, presents the estimators that form the basis of FIA's National Information Management System (NIMS), and shows how annual data are combined for analysis. It also references a number of Web-based supplementary documents that provide greater detail about some of the more obscure aspects of the sampling and estimation system, as well as examples of calculations for most of the common estimators produced by FIA.
1,107 citations
"Integrating urban and national fore..." refers methods in this paper
...The urban inventory was implemented using a systematic unaligned sampling design which is similar to the NFI sample that is based on a hexagonal grid (Reams et al., 2005)....
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...The data were collected using the annualized FIA sample and plot design, where the sampling intensity is approximately one plot for every 2400 ha of area (Reams et al., 2005)....
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TL;DR: Carbon storage and sequestration by urban trees in the United States was quantified to assess the magnitude and role of urban forests in relation to climate change.
521 citations
"Integrating urban and national fore..." refers background in this paper
...As the value of these inventories became increasingly visible, more urban inventory efforts were undertaken in cities around the globe (Thaiutsa et al., 2008; Nagendra and Gopal, 2010; Nowak et al., 2013; Gardi et al., 2016)....
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