January - March, 2012
The Forest Futures Project
The Northern Forest Futures Project (NFFP) is a window on tomorrow's forests, revealing how today's trends and choices can change the future landscape of the Northeast and Midwest. Using the latest inventory data and scientific projections collected by the United States Forest Service (USFS), the Missouri Department of Conservation, other states and cooperating universities, the NFFP helps visualize what's here today and what to expect tomorrow. Ultimately, this project informs decision-making about the sustainable management of public and private forests in the northern United States.
Any projection of future forest conditions needs an assessment of current forest conditions as a basis for comparison. This section describes current forest conditions and trends for the 20 Northern States through selected characteristics associated with forest sustainability. The chosen characteristics come from the internationally recognized Montreal Process Working Group on Criteria and Indicators for the Conservation and Sustainable Management of Temperate and Boreal Forests, a set of 64 indicators within seven broad criteria for sustainability. To these, the USFS has added an eighth criterion focused on the urban and community forests in the northern United States.
The NFFP seeks to focus on the topics of concern to people connected with northern forests. The USFS has tried to gain an understanding of the issues through a "scoping effort" that embraces many sources of input and viewpoints. Issues and influences such as wildlife habitat and biodiversity, forest area, species composition, and size structure, water, recreation, biomass & bioenergy, stood out in the review of what people were saying about the forces that are influencing the Northern Forests.
The future condition of northern forests will depend on many variables. It is impossible to consider every possible future, and so NFFP efforts focus on developing projections from a set of possible future scenarios. Projecting future forest composition and structure under a range of scenarios provides a better basis for judging whether management plans are reasonable and sustainable.
Specifically, the NFFP scenarios assume the following future trends: (1) high economic growth, moderate population growth, (2) moderate economic growth, high population growth and (3) low economic growth, low population growth. For each scenario, forecasts of land uses and forest conditions for the region are completed at a fine spatial resolution covering a 50-year time span.
Preliminary results for Missouri are available from the USFS at:
http://nrs.fs.fed.us/futures/current_conditions/states/?state=MO
and a general overview can be found at:
http://nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/40189