About 90 percent of the land in Maine is in forests. We analyzed past land use trends in Maine and developed projections of future land use. Since the 1950s, the area of forest in Maine has increased by almost 400,000 acres; however, the trends differ among ownerships, as the area of nonindustrial private timberland declined by 800,000 acres since 1950, while private industrial area rose by 681...

Understanding the shifts over time in the distribution and amount of forest vegetation types in relation to forest management and environmental conditions is critical for many policy and ecological questions. Our objective was to assess the influences of ownership and environment on changes in forest vegetation from post-settlement historical to recent times in the central Coast Range of Oregon...

Title of Document: ESSAYS ON SPLIT ESTATE IN ENERGY DEVELOPMENT Timothy W. T. Fitzgerald, Ph.D., 2008 Directed By: Professor Kenneth McConnell Agricultural and Resource Economics Taking advantage of randomly-assigned federal mineral rights, the first essay establishes the discount that mineral developers place on oil and gas leases with divided ownership. This discount is interpreted as an expe...

Few studies have investigated the influence of landownership on biodiversity. Therefore we analysed how the presence of forest understory plant species varied according to landownership in a broad geographical context and assessed which plant traits discriminated between species associated with state, other public or private forests. We also quantified the degree to which differences in soil ty...

—This paper describes our efforts in refining k-nearest neighbor forest attributes classification using U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis plot data and Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus imagery. The analysis focuses on FIA-defined forest type classification across St. Louis County in northeastern Minnesota. We outline three steps in the classifica...

BACKGROUND The emergence of porcine circovirus associated disease (PCVAD) was associated with high mortality in swine populations worldwide. Studies performed in different regions identified spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal trends as factors contributing to patterns of the disease spread. Patterns consistent with spatial trend and spatio-temporal clustering were already identified in this...

T he forestry community is abuzz with anticipation regarding how managed forests will be able to participate in emerging markets for carbon offsets. Carbon markets may in the future offer some potential for compensating forest landowners for actions that demonstrably reduce the atmospheric CO burden. Foresters, however, must recognize that not all forms of enlightened forest management can, or ...

Monitoring is essential in understanding the success or failure of a conservation project and provides the information needed to conduct adaptive management. Although there is a large body of literature on monitoring design, it fails to provide sufficient information to practitioners on how to organize and apply monitoring when implementing landscape-scale conservation projects. We describe a d...

The sawmill industry in the Northeastern United States is represented by a wide variety of mills with highly variable roundwood requirements and diverse procurement operations. Data collected from 211 sawmills in seven states are used to characterize wood procurement, with an emphasis on quantifying variation in operations among different types of firms. In general, respondent mills procured 90...

Land managers need cost-effective methods for mapping and characterizing fire fuels quickly and accurately. The advent of sensors with increased spatial resolution may improve the accuracy and reduce the cost of fuels mapping. The objective of this research is to evaluate the accuracy and utility of imagery from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) satellit...