The goal of this Cross-Cutting Theme (CCT) is to provide current resource information and analyses on a variety of issues, including forest health, and to improve techniques to inventory, monitor, and evaluate forest resources. The South has a wide diversity of tree species, forest conditions, and landowners with varying objectives, and experiences high levels of product demands. Because of the rapidly changing condition of the resource and its importance to the national economy, inventory and monitoring is a high priority across all ownerships. Current initiatives, such as the development of a Southern Annual Forest Inventory System (SAFIS), provide an opportunity for scientists to help develop improved inventory, monitoring, and evaluation techniques. Other issues to be addressed in this integrated context include the assessment of nontraditional resources and the development of spatial forest information through remote sensing and other technologies.

The goals for the Inventory and Monitoring CCT are to develop and implement procedures to assess and monitor the physical resource and social/economic forces affecting the resource, and to develop the technology to efficiently monitor a wide range of resource attributes.

Kinds of Research

The scientific disciplines represented in this CCT include forestry, silviculture, hydrology, computer modeling, wildlife biology, recreation management, and economics. There are four key questions for this CCT: 1) how can strategic inventory and monitoring be implemented to meet timeliness and quality needs across all ownerships of the 13 southern States? 2) how can social and economic influences be integrated into the strategic inventory and monitoring programs? 3) what are the relevant analytical procedures to address sustainability questions and what new criteria and indicators need to be developed? and, 4) how can the technology to achieve the necessary inventory and monitoring needs be developed?

Proposed Outcomes

1. Current strategic resource information and analyses on a variety of issues, on a timely basis.
2. Improved techniques to inventory, monitor, and evaluate forest resources.
3. Inventory and monitoring information available over the Internet.
4. Development and implementation of the Southern Annual Forest Inventory System with improved forest health monitoring procedures.
5. Integration of forest health monitoring with the forest inventory and analysis program with respect to sampling procedures, data collection, and related data compilation.
6. Periodic assessments of social and economic factors affecting forest resources.
7. Procedures to model the development and disturbance of forest stands and individual trees.
8. Remote sensing techniques to achieve basic information regarding forest resources.
9. New instruments to measure physical and biological attributes.