Joanne Lenahan

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The changing needs of private sector forest land
owners

• Joanne Lenahan
• Weyerhaeuser Company
• SAF National FIA User Group Meeting
• March 3, 2009
• New Orleans, Louisiana

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Agenda

• How does the private sector use FIA data?
• What has stayed the same?
• What has changed?
• What can FIA do to address our changing needs?

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How does the private sector use FIA data?
Desired results
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Type of data

• Both FIA plot data and timber products output
  (TPO) data
• Other data sources, along with FIA data, are used
  on a project by project basis. These include
• Internal datasets
• Satellite imagery
• County/state data
• Other US government agency datasets (e.g. USDA)

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Detail of data

• Variables of interest include acreages, volumes,
  numbers of trees
• By species group, age classes, dbh classes,
  forest type etc.
• By geography, ownership group
• Plots grouped into user-defined regions
• Plots within a radius of a certain point
• Across the entire United States

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Purpose

• Raw material supply
• Current inventory
• Trends
• Ability to predict future inventory from data and
  trends
• Scoping work for possible future enterprises or
  expansion of existing facilities

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What has stayed the same?

• Desire for ease of access to national data
• Desire for ability to obtain data ourselves
• Desire for clarity of data definitions
• Volume or biomass in one table volume or
  biomass in another table
• Desire for consistency of data definitions
• Volume in one region Volume in another region
• Desire for both FIA plot and TPO data
• Desire for data by species groups, age, dbh,
  geography
• Desire for timely, accurate information
• Desire for ownership type stratification

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What has changed?

• The definition of Raw Material is becoming
  defined more broadly
• Still interested in the traditional raw materials
  
• Pulp, solid wood
• Those definitions evolve over time as facilities
  are retooled to process smaller material and
  extract product from these smaller pieces (e.g
  engineered wood)
• Expanding to look at all woody biomass
• All parts of the tree tops, stump, branches,
  roots, bole
• All woody biomass Trees/shrubs less than 4 feet
  tall trees/shrubs lt 5 dbh
• This is why tree and log characteristics (dbh,
  length, small end dib) are important to be able
  to classify inventory volumes into products.

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What can FIA do to address our changing needs?

• Provide FIA plot data and TPO data on a timely
  basis
• Shorten the time it takes to publish the data
  to the web
• Improve consistency of data between regions
• New national biomass equations
• Improve clarity of reporting functions on the web
• For example, totbio is the total biomass of live
  growing stock trees on timberland
• Merbio is the merchantable biomass of live and
  dead trees on timberland
• Some confusion over definitions intuitively
  totbio should be greater than merbio (by name)
  but that is not the case.
• Time for hands-on training sessions for web
  access to data?
• Help provide clarity with respect to the changing
  ownership structure away from the traditional
  Forest Industry and NIPF categories.