FORST_AC

PURPOSE: In May and June of 1998 the Southern Research Station's Forest Inventory and Analysis Unit filled a request by David Wear to provide historical information on forested area, inventory and growth across the Southern United States. Such information was needed to support research related to the Forest Service's 1998 Resource Planning Act Assessment. The acreage portion of these data are provided here as the dataset forst_ac.

SOURCE and SCOPE: This dataset contains information from FIA surveys conducted across States of the Southern Research Station (formerly the Southeastern and the Southern Forest Experiment Stations) between 1972 and 1995, aggregated to the county level. Data from two or three survey cycles were available depending on the State involved. Included counties span from eastern Texas north into Arkansas and eastward through Virginia and Florida. Productive forests of all ownerships are included in the survey, although certain large, reserved forests are excluded, most notably the Great Smoky Mountains and the Everglades National Parks. Additional information on survey methods, quality, and interpretation are available through the SRS Forest Inventory and Analysis Unit.

RECORDS and VARIABLES: Each record corresponds to one county and one FIA survey cycle. Specific variables are defined below:

          state     ="State FIPS"
          county    ="county FIPS"
          fips_n    ="FIPS code (numeric)"
          fips_c    ="FIPS code (character)"
          cycle     ="survey iteration (5, 6 or 7)"
          year      ="survey year"
          acr_npin  ="acres of natural pine"
          acr_opin  ="acres of oak/pine"
          acr_uphd  ="acres of upland hardwoods"
          acr_bmhd  ="acres of bottomland hardwoods"
          acr_pppu  ="acres of public planted pine"
          acr_ppin  ="acres of industry/corp. planted pine"
          acr_ppni  ="acres of NIPF planted pine"
          for_totl  ="total timberland acres"

Note that acres of planted pines are further broken out into one of three ownership groups corresponding to forest industry owned or leased, public (federal, state or local governments), or nonindustrial private forest owners (NIPF).

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS:

dBase IV (DBF) at 364 KB or
comma-separated ASCII (CSV) at 137 KB

MODIFICATIONS:

13-DEC-2000 The dataset prior to this revision contained an incorrectly calculated value for for_totl, one that neglected to include natural pine acres. This error has been corrected, and for_totl now correctly reflects the sum of the other acreage categories.

modified: 21-APR-2003
created by: John M. Pye

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