The Forest Analytics Landing

I talk about the future of this podcast series. Thanks for listening! I also discuss a number of forestry-themed podcasts that I listen to regularly, including:

The Digital Forester: https://open.spotify.com/show/3baKFArEldEhMuZvIcAzEK

Silvicast: https://open.spotify.com/show/1CKQGsrH4t5wylZ1cMnAzR

The Forest Overstory: https://open.spotify.com/show/3KkXYfp4RFWkrcQfHJ2fBA

How much forest carbon is in your state? Here I share a few insights for the U.S. Forest Service's excellent report on forests and their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and removals. I discuss the states with the biggest gains (hint: the southeast) and losses (hint: Rocky Mountain states) in the last 30 years.

From the LinkedIn Newsletter:

There remains great interest in understanding the role of forest management in storing and sequestering carbon. While researchers and land managers have a number of tools available to quantify the impacts of forest management on carbon stocks in growing forests, fewer tools are available that depict the carbon stored “off site” in the form of harvested wood products. These can include short-lived products (i.e., paper or pulp) or long-lived ones (i.e., utility poles). Not incorporating harvested wood product data in simulations of forest carbon can underestimate the total amount of carbon being stored, thus diminishing the benefits of active forest management.

In these podcast, I talk about an example case study using data from the long-term silvicultural experiment at the Penobscot Experimental Forest in central Maine. I share how tools like FVS can be leveraged to better understand the contributions of harvested wood products in understanding forest management impacts and the longevity of forest carbon.

• SLIDES: Quantifying harvested wood products and forest management in carbon analyses: https://arbor-analytics.com/events/2023-03-19-quantifying-harvested-wood-products-and-forest-management-in-carbon-analyses/

This podcast episode provides a recap of what's contained in the latest USDA report on greenhouse gas emissions and removals from US forestlands.

The metaverse can sometimes seem too "futuristic" to impact our work lives. This week I write about how the forestry and analytics community should pay attention to the concepts of digital twins, software interoperability, and decentralized autonomous organizations.

Have you heard about the no-code movement in data science? In short, the no-code movement is a type of web development that allows for the creation of software using a graphical user interface, rather than writing code.

This podcast will describe the no-code movement and compare it to a "code-first" approach to performing data analysis.

The US national forest inventory has information contained from over 130,000 forest inventory plots across the country. Data collected and maintained by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program are needed for answering core forestry questions, and having the right tools to help extract specific data that fits the analysis is essential.

This new podcast describes four ways to access FIA data for your use. Links to all of the sources I mention can be found below:

What can forestland and blockchain technology have in common? One opportunity for forest owners is decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs. One group recently purchased a tract a of land in Wyoming and is operating it as a DAO. In this podcast I describe the prospects of how DAOs could play a role in forestland ownership and forest management.

The podcast describes five things to be on the lookout for related to forest carbon programs and markets in 2023. 

This podcast describes pandemic assistance to the US forest products industry. I talk about how the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Pandemic Assistance to Timber Harvesters and Haulers (PATHH) programs helped to keep nearly 500,000 workers employed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Read the article that summarizes this work in the Forest Products Journal: https://meridian.allenpress.com/fpj/article/72/4/253/488883/A-Summary-of-COVID-19-Pandemic-Assistance-to-US 

This podcast describes new research from the forest biometrics community that focuses on forest biomass and carbon estimation. I talk about new equations that are available to estimate tree volume, biomass, and carbon, forest disturbances, small area estimation, and more. Follow along with the slides available at this LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matt-russell-70a94824_russell-carb-presentation-activity-7004143872524066818-dht_?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop 

Annual research funding within the forestry sector is about US$600 million. It used to be more, and we need more research dollars to support forestry's challenges in the future. This podcast discusses the erosion of research and development in forestry, and presents a few models from other sectors that we might look to.

The podcast describes how to spot poor data analyses. A talk about a list of "red flags" that can help you spot poor data analyses that you come across.

Our traditional quantitative courses in forestry cover the basics: forest measurements, statistics, and modeling. In this episode I describe several topics that I think the forestry community needs to teach more of in its courses with students.

The Society of American Foresters Convention occurred from September 20-24, 2022 in Baltimore, MD. In this episode, I recap the Convention and highlight a few sessions that resonated with me.

See the 2022 Society of American Foresters Convention website: https://www.eforester.org/Safconvention

The forest products industry is facing a workforce shortage in truckers. Compensation is often mentioned as a challenge.

The most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate logging truckers earned a median wage of $22.66 per hour. While logging truckers earn similar rates compared to other sectors, the distribution of their wages is much narrower.

Read more:https://arbor-analytics.com/post/2022-08-15-comparing-logging-trucker-wages-to-other-trucking-industries/

I’ve been keeping track of auction prices for carbon through the California Air Resources Board for some time. Last month’s auction represented the largest quarter-over-quarter decreases in the settlement price for carbon. This episode discusses the results of that carbon auction and provide some historical perspective on carbon prices.

Read for more information: https://arbor-analytics.com/post/2022-09-07-price-of-carbon-in-carb-decreases-slightly/

This podcast will discuss four new things in R. Learn about the name change for RStudio, what Quarto is, the tidymodels package, and how the learnr package can help teach R concepts. 

Converting between the volume and weight of wood has always been a nuisance for foresters. Species have different wood properties and are sold into different product classes, complicating converting between the two.

This podcast describes the development of simple wood volume-to-weight conversion factors for 2,500+ species in the US. 

In this podcast I talk about my new book, Statistics in Natural Resources. Applications with R. This new book focuses on the application of statistics in the environmental and natural resources disciplines.

The book is now available for pre-order and will ship August 19. Use discount code ASM07 before Sept 30, 2022 when you order through the Routledge website: http://www.routledge.com/9781032258782

Special thanks to CRC Press, Routledge, and Taylor and Francis for being excellent partners in publishing this work.

How do you visualize the carbon stored across an entire state? A data dashboard! This podcast describes a recent project summarizing the trends and status of carbon in Minnesota's forests.

Harvested wood products in use and solid waste disposal sites represent 4.5% of the total amount of carbon in the United States. So don't overlook them when summarizing forest carbon numbers! Read more here: https://arbor-analytics.com/post/2022-04-23-harvested-wood-products-in-the-forest-vegetation-simulator/

The statistics community has had a lot of discussion in recent years about the role of p -values and statistical significance. What does this mean for forest biometricians and analysts that have traditionally used p -values and tests of significance in their daily work?

The price of carbon continues to climb. The settlement price of one metric tonne of carbon at the California Air Resources Board's May auction was $30.85 in, a 9% increase from November.

“Half of the biomass of a tree is carbon.” This has been a widely spoken statement made by many foresters and scientists alike. So what makes up the other half of biomass?

The R program is one of the most popular programs being used by forest analysts today. Forest analysts use R packages, or collections of functions and data sets, to help guide their everyday work. There are over 18,000 R packages archived on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) repository. R users also make packages available on GitHub, particularly for specific disciplines like forest inventory and measurements. 

This episode focuses on packages that are specific to the discipline of forest inventory. These are packages developed “by foresters, for foresters”. 

On April 22, 2022, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing federal land managers to define and inventory mature and old-growth forests. The work will occur over the next year and will require work from the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to identify threats to older trees.

The forestry community is focused on carbon, and the question of quantity versus quality of credits is increasingly being raised. Credits associated with forest carbon are bringing new opportunities to landowners and the investors that value timberlands. This podcast describes different aspects about the quality and quantity of carbon credits, a difference that's been at the forefront of many conversations in forestry in the last six months.

The podcast describes the application of random forests using forestry data. Random forests have exploded in popularity in the forestry discipline in recent years. Random forests are a quantitative tool categorized as a machine learning technique. Analysts prefer to use random forests methods because they can handle large amounts of data, provide the relative importance of a many variables, and can be applied to classification or regression problems. 

For the post "Random forests in a nutshell", read here: https://arbor-analytics.com/post/random-forests-in-a-nutshell/

For the post "Random forests, a tutorial with tree biomass data, read here: https://arbor-analytics.com/post/2021-09-26-random-forests-a-tutorial-with-forestry-data/ 

I was in college when I first head that pie graphs were bad. I didn’t really understand why at first, but I always appreciated how easy they were to make in Excel and Minitab. This podcast describes an in-class activity I’ve conducted in several statistics classes. I’ll show some data I’ve collected on why pie charts are problematic compared to other visualizations. Read the post to see some of the visualizations: https://arbor-analytics.com/post/2021-03-12-some-data-on-why-pie-graphs-are-bad/

Other papers published by Cleveland and McGill in the mid-1980's:

• Cleveland, W.S., and R. McGill. 1984. Graphical perception: theory, experimentation, and application to the development of graphical methods. Journal of the American Statistical Association 79: 531-554.
• Cleveland, W.S., and R. McGill. 1985. Graphical perception and graphical methods for analyzing scientific data. Science 229: 828-833.

Many forest carbon markets now appeal to a variety of landowners, including small private landowners. The current price of carbon on an annual basis will be a large determinant of a landowner’s willingness to enroll in a carbon market. This podcast describes the price of carbon that landowners are willing to accept for storing carbon in their forest. Read more here: https://arbor-analytics.com/post/2022-02-22-what-does-the-price-of-carbon-have-to-be-for-landowners-to-enroll-in-carbon-markets/

Throughout the pandemic, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) offered loans to businesses to provide a direct incentive for them to keep their workers on payroll. Forest products companies across the US received $4.7 billion in PPP loans offered through the Small Business Administration. Over 35,000 loans were offered to forest products companies in the US from April 2020 through May 2021, affecting 487,000 workers in the forest industry.

The value in timberlands as an investment increased by over 9% in 2021, the largest annual gain since 2014. This podcast describes the returns from timberland investments compared to national economic indicators in the last 12 years. 

Despite many recent challenges to the forest products industry, the increasing role of harvested wood products in our “carbon portfolio” is a bright side that should make its workers proud. This podcast describes carbon in harvested wood products. Read more here: https://arbor-analytics.com/post/2021-05-15-harvested-wood-products-an-increasing-contributor-to-us-carbon-storage/

This is the trailer for The Forest Analytics Landing podcast.