Leveraging Open Data to Support Forest Mapping, Modeling, and Policy Analysis in the Pacific Northwest, USA

Increasing access to open data can offer unprecedented opportunities to conduct and share actionable science involving forest ecology, management, and conservation. This dissertation recounts three diverse applications of open data and ecosystem data science in the Pacific Northwest, USA: (i) to generate maps of forest conditions that can be easily updated as new earth observation data arrive; (ii) to develop a reproducible workflow to recalibrate the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS), a widely used growth-and-yield model, as new field observations arise; and (iii) to quantify tradeoffs in timber, carbon, and cash flow among alternative management approaches in Douglas-fir forests.