James Pollard (Geoscience), program director of his department's partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service forest inventory and analysis (FIA) program, has entered into a new funding agreement with FIA for $1.5 million per year. This joint venture will enable UNLV researchers to continue contributing to the national FIA program’s information-management systems. The new five-year agreement was signed on June 6 and is available for additional yearly funding increments at comparable levels to this year’s funding.
The FIA program, with the assistance of UNLV scientists, reports on the extent, condition, and trends of all the forests in the United States. Each year, as part of the national program, vast raw datasets are collected through standardized field methods and remote sensing. UNLV-FIA serves as FIA’s partner in researching and developing optimal information-management systems to collect, compile, and distribute forest data and information to policy makers, researchers, interest groups, industry, and all citizens. With these systems in place, governmental and academic entities have been able to access and use the data in studies across diverse disciplines in areas such as forest-product economics; wildlife habitat modeling; efficacy and sustainability of management practices; assessment of threats, including fire, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, disease, and climate change; conservation education; and more.
The national FIA program has been in operation for almost 90 years. Since the late 1990s, UNLV scientists have contributed technical expertise to a variety of ongoing FIA information-management projects, including the national management system-computation system, forest inventory and analysis database, design and analysis toolkit for inventory and monitoring, forest inventory data online, timber products output, national woodland owner survey, and others. The UNLV-FIA group currently is a 16-person team.
