Understanding roundwood production in the United States at fine spatial and temporal scales is needed to support a range of analyses for decision making. Currently, estimates of county-level roundwood production are available at various time intervals for different regions of the country and for different products. Here we present our reasoning for moving to an annual timber products monitoring program and further present a comparison of sample designs to facilitate an annual program without increased effort. We found that both probability proportional to size and stratified simple random sampling designs were viable options, but the stratified simple random sampling design provided more flexibility. This flexibility was deemed important to target emerging markets and to enable sampling with certainty of specific firms. Our results lay the foundations for moving to an annual timber products output monitoring design in support of market, sustainability, and policy analyses as well as projections.

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.

Understanding the extent and timing of forest disturbances and their impacts is critical to formulating effective management and policy responses. Broad-scale inventory programs provide key estimates of forest parameters that indicate the extent and severity of disturbance impacts. Here, we review the use of a post-stratified estimator in a panelized design, in the context of disturbance observations that are collected retrospectively. We further develop a sample weight adjustment that is requisite for proper estimation of the extent and timing of disturbances. Using populations from areas of Arkansas, California, and Maine in the US, the weight adjustment technique was tested in a Monte Carlo simulation. We found that the estimated area of disturbance using the weight adjustment technique had satisfactory agreement with the true population values and performed considerably better than the conventional post-stratified estimation approach. The proliferation of panelized forest inventory designs globally suggests that accurate estimates of areal extent and timing of disturbances will often require that weighting adjustment techniques be employed in the estimation process.

An analysis of United States national forest inventory observations in the Laurentian Mixed Forest reveals a marked increase in forest disturbance between 1999 and 2015. The Laurentian Mixed Forest Province ecological subregion spans the northern sections of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and includes forest area of between 16.7 and 17.5 million hectares depending on the year. Forest disturbance ranges from a low of 0.13 million hectares (0.8% of forest area) in 2000 to a high of 2.09 million hectares (11.9% of forest area) in 2014. The year 2015 is notable for being the first year since 2000 where forest disturbance declines, albeit modestly (11.4% of forest area). The marked increase is attributable to disturbances occurring continuously over time between remeasurement. Disturbances with the highest annual averages are insect damage to trees, disease damage to trees, and deer/ungulate at 291 thousand, 189 thousand, and 126 thousand hectares per year, respectively. Disturbances occurring in a specific year, what we term discrete disturbances, show no discernible trend during the period. The most extensive discrete disturbances are wind in 1999, 2011, and 2012 at 108 thousand, 62 thousand, and 61 thousand hectares, respectively. Standard estimates from national forest inventory lack specificity as to the actual year of the disturbance. The estimates reported here are actual annual estimates of disturbance that apply estimation methods accounting for the retrospective nature of the disturbance observation. The timing (year) and location (ecological section) of the two most extensive wind events coincide with historical records.