President Biden’s executive order, ‘Strengthening the Nation’s Forests, Communities, and Local Economies,’ (EO#14072, April 22, 2022) acknowledges the interest in mature and old-growth (MOG) forests by directing U.S. Federal agencies to consistently define and inventory these resources including sampling errors on United States Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. We address this Presidential Order by estimating old-growth forests as a cross walk between local old-growth field surveys and the official inventory of US forests (USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis) to achieve national consistency then defining mature forests as a growth stage prior to the onset of identified old-growth attributes within a proposed Forest Inventory Growth Stage System (FIGSS). Such a quantification system is based on a variety of components that could be used to account for cultural values ascribed to forest conditions which could be refined across future versions such as assumptions about the relative length of growth stages, incorporating data from emerging monitoring technologies along with old-growth/mature field sampling campaigns, accommodating spectrums of site-limited and/or disturbance-driven stand development, and refined variable selection processes such as machine-learning.
Speaker Biography
Christopher Woodall is the National Program Leader for forest carbon quantification research in the Research and Development (R&D) deputy area of the US Forest Service, Washington, DC. Since 2021, Woodall has served at R&D’s national office as a technical lead on various emerging national and international forest topics including: European Union Deforestation Regulations, Executive Order #14072 Mature and Old-Growth Classification, Interagency Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification Team, and USDA Entity Scale GHG Methods for Forests. Prior to this assignment, Woodall served as a Research Forester, Group Leader, and Project Leader with the US Forest Service’s Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program and a Northern Experimental Forest Research Work Unit over a span of twenty years where his research and leadership centered on implementing FIA’s national inventory of dead wood and fuels, strategic scale forest density assessments, adaptive silviculture, carbon accounting, and tree regeneration in the context of associated range dynamics. He holds a BS in Forestry from Clemson University and MS/Ph.D. in Silviculture from the University of Montana.
Conserving Mature and Old-Growth Forests in a Changing Climate Speaker Series
There is broad agreement that protecting and managing forests is critical for meeting global climate mitigation and sustainable development goals. However, there is less agreement on how to determine what is ‘best’ management to reach these goals in the context of mature and old-growth forests (MOG). This webinar series invites a variety of speakers representing the United States Forest Service, Tribal nations, private forest owners, forest industry, academia, and forest advocacy organizations to share how they are responding to and shaping the discussion on mature and old-growth forests, including as mandated by Executive Order 140752 and the National Old-Growth Amendment.
Join us every Thursday from August 29 to December 5 from 12:00 -12:55 pm U.S. ET. Note that there will not be webinars on September 19 and November 28.
The series is free and open to the public. Each session will be recorded. We will offer CEUs for foresters in attendance. Please email
yff@yale.edu(link sends e-mail) for further information.
Series Hosts
Series Facilitators
The series is facilitated by Mark Ashton (The Forest School at YSE), Gary Dunning (The Forest School at YSE), Sara Kuebbing (Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program and Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture), and Terry Baker (Society of American Foresters).
To learn more and register, visit: https://yff.yale.edu/speaker-series/conserving-mature-and-old-growth-forests-changing-climate
