Fall 2005

Housing Density Increases on Key Southeastern Watersheds

In May 2005, the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station published Forests on the Edge, the first in a series of reports about the effects of increases in housing density in privately owned forests. The following is excerpted from the report.

Concern about the effects of development on America’s private forests has risen sharply since the 1990s, when the conversion of forestland to developed uses reached a million acres per year. Forest Service researchers estimate that, by 2050, an additional 23 million acres of U.S. forestlands may be lost.

Forests on the Edge displays and describes housing density projections on privately held forestland for the continental United States by watershed. For the report, researchers selected only those fourth-level watersheds (consisting of an average of a million acres) that had 10 percent or more forest cover and 50 percent or more of the forested land in private ownership. A total of 1,026 of the Nation’s 2,149 fourth-level watersheds met these criteria.

The analysts projected that more than 15 of the 1,026 watersheds selected will experience housing density increases on more than 200,000 acres of their surface area. All of the top 15 watersheds are located in the Eastern United States, with 9 located in the Southeastern United States.

Back to Rapid Changes In Forest Ownership Increase Fragmentation

For more information about the Forest on the Edge project:
Susan Stein at 202–205–0837 or sstein@fs.fed.us

The full text of Forests on the Edge is available at
http://www.fs.fed.us/projects/ fote/reports/fote-6-9-05.pdf