Forest Service Research & Development

This month's Research and Development newsletter focuses on the Science to Improve Firefighter Safety and Wellbeing

Wood builds the backbone of a sustainable society. Wood products can store carbon, replace more carbon-intensive materials, and biodegrade — meaning bacteria and other organisms can break them down. In the Forest Service, our scientists advance the field of wood innovations. They engineer new, sustainable uses for wood and quantify its environmental benefits.

We may each know a bit about the trees outside our doors. But how might we assess the forests of an entire nation? We turn to the nation’s tree census: our Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program. This program counts, measures, and monitors trees on 325,000 public and privately-owned plots. These plots span 9 time zones, from Guam to the Caribbean territories, and contain about 19 million trees. We invest $75 million a year in FIA to collect data focused on three themes: inventorying…