MSU Forestry professor amongst colleagues receives FIA Director’s Award
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EmailResearcher in the department of forestry makes impactful contribution to US forest inventory
Dr. David MacFarlane, a professor in the department of forestry at Michigan State University, recently received the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program (FIA) Director’s Award for applying results of FIA research and reporting to inform policy, monitor trends in forest resources and adaptively manage, or improve land stewardship, along with a large group of collaborators (listed below).
This work was a decade-long collaboration across multiple universities to develop and release the new National Scale Volume Biomass models. These combined efforts were instrumental in ensuring the FIA program met the Farm Bill’s congressional priority for a nationally consistent framework for volume, biomass, and carbon estimates. This multi-year effort will go a long way in considerably more accurate analysis of the US national forest inventory; the new models already resulted in 11% more carbon being found in U.S. forests.
MacFarlane’s research on more accurately modeling tree branches was instrumental in this discovery, as most of the “missing carbon” was found in tree branches, as the carbon in tree branches was being overlooked.
Traditionally in forestry, most of the focus was on estimating the volume of the main stems in tree branches and valuable trunk parts of the tree, where wood products come from. When people started to want to account for whole-tree biomass and carbon, there was a lot of methods that took the existing trunk measurements and models and extrapolated the tops and branches from them.
MacFarlane started giving talks and writing papers back in 2009, explaining that there were issues with these methods and the current models were not accurately modeling the branches. Further research and analysis proved this to be exactly right.
All collaborators:
- Jim Westfall, NRS-FIA
- John Coulston, SRS
- Andy Gray, PNWRS-FIA
- John Shaw, RMRS-FIA
- Grant Domke, NRS-FIA
- Liz Burrill, NRS-FIA
- Jason Brown, RMRS-FIA
- Mark Hatfield, NRS-FIA
- Scott Pugh, NRS-FIA
- Jeff Turner, SRS-FIA
- David Walker, SRS
- Yinfang Wang, National Forest System
- Wes Hart, University of Nevada Las Vegas
- Brian Cordova, University of Nevada Las Vegas
- Karin Kralicek, RMRS-FIA
- Philip J. Radtke, Virginia Tech
- Aaron Weiskittel, U Maine
- David MacFarlane, Mich State U
- David Affleck, U of Montana
- Dehai Zhao, U of Georgia
- Hailemariam Temesgen, Oregon State U
- Krishna P. Poudel, Mississippi State U
- Jereme M. Frank, State of Maine
- Steve Prisley, NCASI
- Andrew Sánchez Meador; N Arizona U
- David Auty, N Arizona U
