PRODUCING GROWTH ESTIMATES OF DUKE FOREST PINE STANDS USING USDA’S FOREST VEGETATION SIMULATOR
Abstract
Duke Forest manages its loblolly pine stands for timber revenues. Duke Forest seeks
construct a management plan informed by an optimized harvest schedule. This project
aims to produce a reliable growth and yield model in order to produce the volume yield
estimates necessary to compute the optimized harvest schedule. This was accomplished
by testing and calibrating USDA’s Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) using Duke Forest
Continuous Forest Inventory data. FVS was tested by using different site index inputs,
and the diameter growth modifiers of FVS were then applied to reproduce current loblolly
pine stand characteristics. It was found that the observed site index of a Duke Forest
loblolly pine stand produces a better estimate of Duke Forest basal areas than do
the Natural Resource Conservation Service’s Web Soil Survey site indices. Despite
the use of the more accurate site index numbers, FVS needed further calibration in
order to produce statistically significant estimates of Duke Forest basal areas. Diameter
growth modifiers of 1.25, 2.6, and 2.6 were applied to stands with low, average, and
high site indices respectively, which calibrated the model. FVS, when calibrated,
can provide Duke Forest with a workable growth and yield model. In the future, even
more precise calibrations will be possible as the continuous Forest Inventory process
continues, and plots sampled for this project are re-sampled. This will inform the
diameter and height growth increments FVS uses to grow the inputted trees into the
future.
Type
Master's projectPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22641Citation
Bowman, Hunter (2021). PRODUCING GROWTH ESTIMATES OF DUKE FOREST PINE STANDS USING USDA’S FOREST VEGETATION
SIMULATOR. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22641.Collections
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