Sneak Peek: The Forestry Source, April 2019

March 28, 2019

Wondering what's coming up in the next edition of The Forestry Source? Here's a sneak peek of the action. Enjoy! Missing out on this great publication? Join SAF! 

The State of America’s Forests: An Interactive Guide
The State of America’s Forests: An Interactive Guide is a website that “tells a story of consumption and conservation, of conflict and collaboration. But most of all, it is a story of regrowth, renewal, and abundance.” Within its online pages, the guide offers a graphical view of data from the US Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis unit (FIA) and many other sources, in three main sections: benefits such as water, recreation, and forest products and services; threats such as wildfire, invasive species, and insects and disease; and stewardship, including forestland ownership, certification, harvesting, and reforestation. According to project producer Mila Alvarez, “The first objective was to produce an assessment of the nation’s forests—where are we heading? We provide a comprehensive examination that takes the latest and greatest published information that gives you some understanding of the current state of our forests and the trends over the years. And we tried to put all of this complex information in a format that creates understanding.”

Managing Eastern Redcedar in Oklahoma
In Oscar Hammerstein’s song “Oklahoma,” Curly sings, “Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain”—not where the wind comes sweeping down the woodlands. Yet that’s the reality in portions of the state. Although eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) is native to Oklahoma, decades of fire exclusion have allowed this tree to move onto the state’s tallgrass prairies. Until recently, it wasn’t known just how widespread eastern redcedar was. This article looks at a study designed to determine if new markets could be developed to encourage the removal of eastern redcedar.

Ryan Vogel: At the Intersection of Urbanity and Wilderness
The Forestry Source continues its series of profiles of up-and-coming SAF members who will continue managing our nation’s natural resources in the coming decades. This month we are featuring Ryan Vogel, a dual-degree master’s student at Ohio State University (OSU). Since joining SAF, Vogel has twice been selected as an SAF Diversity Scholar, in 2016 and 2018. In 2017, he was awarded a Kurt Gottschalk Science Fund grant to support his thesis work on city and regional urban-forest planning in central Ohio. And at the 2018 SAF National Convention, he presented on why foresters should be more involved in city planning. Vogel is also an active member of the SAF Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, for which he recently submitted a field-trip proposal for the upcoming national convention in Louisville—a Halloween night hike that beat out his other idea of underground urban mountain biking. Additionally, he will co-lead a workshop on diversity at the Ohio SAF Winter Meeting.

Adjusting Your Cruise Stats with Your Field Experience: A Rigorous Approach
When a timber cruise comes back higher than we expect, something doesn’t feel quite right. It doesn’t match up with our experience. We might be inclined to shave the estimates down a bit. Is this just fudging the numbers? In this month’s Biometrics Bits column, Brian Clough explores a rigorous and justifiable way to incorporate our experience and prior expectations into our inventory estimates.

Jack-of-All-Trades Handheld
A Field Tech review of the “Swiss Army knife” of handheld computers: DT Research’s DT301T, a rugged Windows tablet that has a dual-frequency (L1 and L2) Global Navigation Satellite System receiver capable of real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning in the one-centimeter range.