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  Caribbean Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program


The Caribbean Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program produces traditional forest inventories and conducts research in all of the IITF research areas: ecosystems, stand and landscape dynamics, and wildlife biodiversity.  The Program is jointly managed by the USFS Southern Research Station and IITF.  The program inventories forests in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI); advises on or conducts inventories in other countries; and builds on Puerto Rico and USVI datasets to build ecological models and for research in landscape ecology and remote sensing. Research focuses on complex tropical landscapes.

Example research topics: the dynamics and spatial distributions of tropical forest trees, communities and species diversity from stand to landscape scales, including communities with naturalized (exotic) tree species; forest nutrient pools and atmospheric greenhouse gas fluxes; forest biodiversity conservation including remote sensing of wildlife habitat characteristics; potential impacts of climate and land-cover change on forests and watersheds; and the influence of current and historical landscape patterns on these attributes and processes.



Personnel
 Personnel 
Eileen Helmer  
Products
 Title 
2008 Diversity and biomass of tropical forests cleared for land development
To learn more about the tropical forests that are cleared when urban and residential development spreads, scientists assembled the most comprehensive time series of land cover maps to date for the island of Puerto Rico. They learned that most of the forests cleared for land development from 1991 to 2000, 55%, were young (113 yr). ...
Publications
 Title 
2008 Contribution of dead wood to biomass and carbon stocks in the Caribbean: St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands
2008 Factors influencing spatial pattern in tropical forest clearance and stand age: implications for carbon storage and species diversity
Little is known about the tropical forests that undergo clearing as urban/built-up and other developed lands spread. This study uses remote sensing-based maps of Puerto Rico , multinomial logit models and forest inventory data to explain patterns of forest age and the age of forests cleared for land development and assess their implications for forest carbon storage and tree species richness. ...
2006 Development of equations for predicting Puerto Rican subtropical dry forest biomass and volume
2008 Mapping U.S. forest biomass using nationwide forest inventory data and moderate resolution information
2009 Novel plant communities after large-scale deforestation.
Environmental and past land use controls on tree species assemblages on the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands were characterized to determine whether biophysical factors or land-use history has been more important in determining the species composition of secondary tropical forests after large-scale forest clearing for agriculture, widespread species introduction, and landscape-scale forest fragmentation. ...
View All Publications (6) For This Project...