Forest Service experiments?

taliv

Adventurist
on another site, i saw a breakdown of the bazillion dollar wealth transfer our fed gov is up to. buried in the handouts and freebies, I found this line:


The U.S. Forest Service would get $3 million to "reestablish experiments impacted by travel restrictions" stemming from the pandemic, including an ongoing forest inventory.

Anyone have any insight into what that might mean?
 
on another site, i saw a breakdown of the bazillion dollar wealth transfer our fed gov is up to. buried in the handouts and freebies, I found this line:


The U.S. Forest Service would get $3 million to "reestablish experiments impacted by travel restrictions" stemming from the pandemic, including an ongoing forest inventory.

Anyone have any insight into what that might mean?

Can't speak to any direct examples, but I suspect they mean actual scientific experiments for various conservation and management research. When I worked for a company that made scientific equipment for measuring river outflows, oceanographic forces, etc., the USGS, USFS, USN, and various other US agencies were some of our most important clients.

For example, one of the products I worked on was used to calculate flow rates downstream of various snowpack sites. Several times per year, government scientists would drive, hike, or even horseback into various locations with our instrument and do sample measurements by floating it across the water flow. Do this a few times a year in a few different places and you can build a very accurate picture of the water yield from a given snowpack. Doing the same data collection year-over-year is super important both for recognizing trends but also to help tune calculation and estimates based on other data. (i.e. if you sample a given river 3x/year for 10 years, and correlate those direct waterflow measurements to weather data, you can build a more accurate model to predict waterflow based entirely on weather data alone.)

My company dealt with water flow, but I know there are a lot of other experiments that have been run in the past to look at everything from reforestation techniques to soil conservation, chemistry, etc.
 
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An “ongoing forest inventory” is pretty simple really, and necessary. Foresters for any large land holder walk the land and count the trees, noting types, age and health etc per acre. This is not new.

What a great job that would be :D
 
There is an experimental forest in Sedalia. No idea what the experiment is, but I drive by the no trespassing signs often.
 
That was kinda my question optimistic. I get inventory. I get experiments. The mix was confusing.
 
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