Collins Pine and FIA Comparison

<p>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.</p>