Forest Inventory and Management

Forest managers assume the challenging responsilbity of meeting today's wood and fiber demands while managing forests for the future.  While tools exist to oversee wood production or to monitor pest damage, there are few tools that enable monitoring of forest growth and health over large areas.

Remote sensing of forests is likely to become a key approach to managing forests for the diversity of needs presented by our environment and society.  Both aerial photographs and satellite images can be used to create detailed maps of general forest characteristics, at local, state and regional scales, and to drive analytical models that produce useful and increasingly accurate forest statistics. 

Such detailed and increasingly affordable information is useful not only to forest managers, but also to local and state agencies who need forest information to support their policy and mangement decisions.Research of remote sensing-based forest inventory and management approaches has been a major focus for the RSGL since its inception in 1972.  Today,  this research focuses on refining satellite image forest classification techniques and developing image product solutions for forest management activities.

For additional information on our remote sensing of forest resources research, visit eForest, the project website for our NASA-supported collaborative effort between researchers and forest resource managers integrating satellite technologies into forest inventory and field methods.