1 Forest Resources and Conditions

The forests of the northern United States support a rich mix of floral and faunal communities that provide inestimable benefits to society. Today's forests face a range of biotic and abiotic stressors, not the least of which may be environmental change. This chapter reviews the compositional traits of presettlement forests and traces the major land use patterns that led to the development of contemporary forested ecosystems. Human impacts have dominated forest development over the last 150 years, so considerable attention is paid to current compositional, structural, and successional traits resulting from these impacts. Estimates of forest carbon storage set the stage for later chapters dealing with environmental factors affecting forest health and resiliency. Resource sustainability is addressed by examining productive capacity (growth) in relation to forest drain components: mortality and removals. Historical information has been gleaned from the literature. Source material for recent trends in timber-land area, species composition, stand structure, and net forest drain is from the successive state-level forest inventories conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) unit. Much of this information was compiled from the FIA's Eastwide Database (Hansen et al., 1992). W.H. McWilliams et al. Northern Forests in Perspectiv