Richard A. Birdsey
Program Manager

610.557.4092
610.557.4095 (fax)
rbirdsey@fs.fed.us (e-mail)

EDUCATION:
Dr. Birdsey received a Ph.D. degree in quantitative methods from the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He has a Master's Degree in World Forestry and a Bachelor's Degree in Anthropology.

PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY:
He spent 2 years as a Peace Corps Forester in Ecuador, 10 years as a Research Forester with the Forest Service in the Forest Inventory and Analysis Project at the Southern Research Station, and 3 years on the Forest Inventory and Analysis Staff in the Washington Office of the Forest Service. He has been Program Manager for Global Change Research for the last 10 years at the Northeastern and North Central Research Stations. Dr. Birdsey is a specialist in quantitative methods for large-scale forest inventories and has pioneered the development of methods to estimate national carbon budgets for forest lands from forest inventory data.

CURRENT RESEARCH:
He is a major contributor to the ongoing inventory of US greenhouse gases and sinks compiled by USDA, EPA, and DOE. He is a cooperator with the Sukachev Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in a project to estimate the Russian carbon budget. Dr. Birdsey has compiled and published estimates of historical and prospective US forest carbon sources and sinks, and analyzed options for increasing the role of US forests as carbon sinks. In his current role as Program Manager, Dr. Birdsey is coordinating a national research effort to analyze the impacts of international protocols on carbon accounting for the US, and to identify forest management strategies to increase carbon sequestration. He is also coordinating an interagency study of large-scale ecosystem monitoring methods in the Delaware River Basin. He manages a large basic research program involving 12 US Forest Service Laboratories and Experimental Forests, and 12 cooperating Universities and other institutions, with research emphases on basic plant processes, ecosystem nutrient cycling, and measurement and modelling techniques.

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH INTERESTS:
Dr. Birdsey has had significant roles in several large assessments of US Forest Resources:
The South's Fourth Forest: Alternatives for the Future, 1988
An Analysis of the Timber Situation in the United States: 1989-2040, 1990
Climate Change and America's Forests (1993 RPA Update), 1993
The Impact of Climate Change on America’s Forests (2000 RPA Assessment), 2000

SUBJECT AREA INDEX:
Atmospheric deposition, biometrics, computer modeling, ecosystem processes, global change, inventory and analysis, monitoring, biomass.