Forestry Reports

"The goals for the NCA indicators are to provide meaningful, authoritative climaterelevant measures about the status and trends of key physical, ecological, and societal variables and values; inform decisions on management, research, and education at local to regional to national scales; identify climate- related conditions and impacts to help develop effective mitigation and adaptation measures; and provide clear analytical methods by which user communities can derive their own indicators for particular purposes." "[ T]he United States is adopting the Forest Carbon Accounting Framework, a new approach that removes...older inventory information from the accounting procedures and enables the delineation of forest carbon accumulation by forest growth, land use change, and natural disturbances such as fire... [N]et land use change is a substantial contributor to the United States forest carbon sink, with the entire forest sink offsetting approximately 15 percent of annual US carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels." [...]sites sensitive to harvesting impacts (e.g., fine-textured soil and steep slopes) should be approached with caution and prior planning to minimize undesirable responses."