Location
Washington, DC 20250-1111
We are a multi-faceted agency that manages and protects 154 national forests and 20 grasslands in 43 states and Puerto Rico. The agency’s mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.
We have an elite wildland firefighting team and the world’s largest forestry research organization. Our experts provide technical and financial help to state and local government agencies, businesses, private landowners and work government-to-government with tribes to help protect and manage non-federal forest and associated range and watershed lands.
We augment our work through partnerships with public and private agencies that help us plant trees, improve trails, educate the public, and improve conditions in wildland/urban interfaces and rural areas, just to name a few. Our team also promotes sustainable forest management and biodiversity conservation internationally.
Gifford Pinchot, first Chief of the Forest Service, summed up the mission of the Forest Service: "to provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people in the long run."
Members:
Resources
Displaying 1 - 5 of 23increasing landowner compensation for ecosystem servicesGiving credit where credit is dueIncreasing landowner compensation for ecosystem services
utility of the cropland data layer for forest inventory and analysis
The Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Northern Research Station Forest Inventory and Analysis program (NRS-FIA) uses digital land cover products derived from remotely sensed imagery, such as the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), for the purpose of variance reduction via postsampling stratification. The update cycle of the NLCD product is infrequent; NLCD 2001 was the first update since the release of NLCD 1992, and was not yet fully completed as of late 2006.
Research applications of ecosystem patterns
This article discusses the origins of natural ecosystem patterns from global to local scales. It describes how understanding these patterns can help scientists and managers in two ways. First, the local systems are shown within the context of larger systems. This perspective can be applied in assessing the connections between action at one scale and effect at another, the spatial transferability of models, and the links between terrestrial and aquatic systems. Second, scientists and managers can benefit because they gain information about the geographic patterns in ecosystems.