Research Groups
Publications List

Research faculty in FERM comprise five major disciplinary groupings, each with a mix of basic/theoretical and applied/practical activities: water and watersheds, silviculture and disturbances, applied economics, forest engineering and operations, and mensuration and models.

Some key current research areas include:
• understanding forest watershed processes, related effects of management activities, and ways to control negative impacts on fisheries and water quality
• applications of silviculture and vegetation management (including regeneration technology) to expand sustainable harvests, improve forest resilience and reduce losses from unnatural disturbances
• estimating trade-offs between marketed and non-marketed forest products and values in the policy decision process
• enhancing supply chain efficiency and returns to forest land owners and the wood processing industry through improved logging methods, measurement and merchandizing, and transportation system management from solid wood products to bioenergy
• application of planning models to enable analysis of costs, outputs and uncertainty across multiple ownerships and for multiple landscape attributes over long time periods in order to project effects of policy on outputs, sustainable forest structures and carbon stocks
• modeling of forest development in response to management activities, environmental changes and wildland fire and other natural disturbances, and how these influence landscape-level vegetation dynamics and forest planning
• increasing efficiency and accuracy in forest data sampling and monitoring methods to support all phases of forest management including timber production, fire hazard reduction, biomass utilization and carbon sequestration
• application of measurement, mapping, and data management technologies to improve the cost-effectiveness of forest management activities and to evaluate environmental impacts.
• evaluating forest practices policies for private and public lands