Identifying Sources of Data
for Measuring the Montréal Process Indicators in the
Summary
and compilation by
April
S. Grecho
Coordinated
by
Erin
O. Sills
Department
of Forestry
June 2004
SUMMARY
This project continued collaboration between the NC State University Department of Forestry and the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station. This collaboration had resulted in a crosswalk for the Southern Forest Resource Assessment (SFRA) and the Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators. This phase of the project focused on additional data sources for measuring the MP Indicators in the US South. April Grecho and Erin Sills of NC State University collaborated with Jennifer Hayes and Susan Fox of the US Forest Service. The goal is to provide information to policy makers, researchers, and other stakeholders about biological, social, and economic concerns regarding the sustainability of southern forests.
Additional data sources outside of SFRA were sought through questionnaires distributed at the Southern Roundtable on Sustainable Forests, meetings with the NCSU Department of Forestry Graduate Students and the USDA FS Economics Unit located in Research Triangle Park, NC, reviews of data sources used in the USDA FS Northeastern Area and Northeastern Area Association of State Forests Base Indicators of Sustainability Report and the Oregon First Approximation Report, emails and conversations with scientists suggested through the previous activities or listed as criteria and indicator authors for the National Report, as well as searches of the literature and the web. These results are complied into a spreadsheet with hotlinks to appropriate web pages for agencies and organizations. (Note that if a hotlink returns an error page, you should try copying and pasting the URL into your browser). Additional columns indicate the spatial and temporal scale of the data sources and provide comments on the listed data sources and other potential data sources that have been suggested. In a few cases, no data sources specific to the South are listed, because the National Report contains detailed regional or state-level information for those indicators. This spreadsheet could be continuously updated as new data and research are reported. This version reflects data sources identified and URLs active as of 30 June 2004.
During this project, the 2003 National Report on Sustainable Forests was released in February 2004, along with a Data Report Supplement with analyses of individual indicators at the national level. An overview of this project is provided by Brad Smith, USDA Research Forester in the Washington Office, in his report on indicator # 61. This report also provides a brief chart summarizing coverage, currency, and frequency of the indicators at the national level. Individual authors for specific indicators in the National Report were contacted for suggestions of additional sources relevant to the South and comments on the sources listed.
The Montreal Process has so far provided an accepted framework for sustainability indicators by the US and 11 other nations that contain 90 percent of the world’s temperate forests. The data sources identified by this project will be useful for research on the individual indicators and for developing regional indicators for the US South. We expect that the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station will make this information available to a wide range of stakeholders interested in measuring and monitoring forest sustainability in the US South.