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 hierarchical structuring and spatial distributions of tropical forest tree communities and tree species diversity, 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.