The changing needs of private sector forest land owners

1. The changing needs of private sector forest land owners Joanne Lenahan Weyerhaeuser Company SAF National FIA User Group Meeting March 3, 2009 New Orleans, Louisiana 1

2. Agenda • How does the private sector use FIA data? • What has stayed the same? • What has changed? • What can FIA do to address our changing needs?

3. How does the private sector use FIA data? Desired results

4. Type of data • Both FIA plot data and timber products output (TPO) data • Other data sources, along with FIA data, are used on a project by project basis. These include: • Internal datasets • Satellite imagery • County/state data • Other US government agency datasets (e.g. USDA)

5. Detail of data • Variables of interest include acreages, volumes, numbers of trees • By species group, age classes, dbh classes, forest type etc. • By geography, ownership group • Plots grouped into user-defined regions • Plots within a radius of a certain point • Across the entire United States

6. Purpose • Raw material supply • Current inventory • Trends • Ability to predict future inventory from data and trends • Scoping work for possible future enterprises or expansion of existing facilities

7. What has stayed the same? • Desire for ease of access to national data • Desire for ability to obtain data ourselves • Desire for clarity of data definitions • Volume or biomass in one table = volume or biomass in another table • Desire for consistency of data definitions • Volume in one region = Volume in another region • Desire for both FIA plot and TPO data • Desire for data by species groups, age, dbh, geography • Desire for timely, accurate information • Desire for ownership type stratification

8. What has changed? • The definition of Raw Material is becoming defined more broadly • Still interested in the traditional raw materials • Pulp, solid wood • Those definitions evolve over time as facilities are retooled to process smaller material and extract product from these smaller pieces (e.g engineered wood) • Expanding to look at all woody biomass • All parts of the tree – tops, stump, branches, roots, bole • All woody biomass – Trees/shrubs less than 4 feet tall; trees/shrubs < 5” dbh; • This is why tree and log characteristics (dbh, length, small end dib) are important to be able to classify inventory volumes into products.

9. What can FIA do to address our changing needs? • Provide FIA plot data and TPO data on a timely basis • Shorten the time it takes to ‘publish’ the data to the web • Improve consistency of data between regions • New national biomass equations • Improve clarity of reporting functions on the web • For example, totbio is the total biomass of live growing stock trees on timberland • Merbio is the merchantable biomass of live and dead trees on timberland • Some confusion over definitions – intuitively totbio should be greater than merbio (by name) – but that is not the case. • Time for hands-on training sessions for web access to data? • Help provide clarity with respect to the changing ownership structure away from the traditional “Forest Industry” and “NIPF” categories.