US-IALE 2018

AUTHORS: Anantha Prasad, Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service

ABSTRACT: An important aspect of understanding climatic impacts on tree species originating in the eastern United States is to evaluate the redistribution of suitable habitats considering the entire range of the species. Unfortunately, the analysis so far had to be truncated to the eastern US owing to the lack of availability of Forest Inventory Analysis (FIA) equivalent data in Canada. In order to bypass this thorny issue, I used a multi-model classification approach (variants of random forest and boosting) to model the entire range of six economically important tree species (white pine, eastern hemlock, red maple, sugar maple, black cherry and northern red oak) using Little’s range maps and 20 climatic variables (AdaptWest Project). A similar analysis was done using FIA data in the eastern United States using both classification and regression approaches. The combined evaluation of suitable habitats in multiple regions revealed some interesting trends that are of importance to future seed-zone delineations and silvicultural management in the United States and Canada.