Note that the data published in the 2002 State of the Nation’s Ecosystems Report as well as the 2003 and 2005 Web-Only Updates have been superseded by the 2008 Report and thus should be used with caution. For the most recent data, purchase the 2008 Report from Island Press.

The Data

The data for this indicator were collected by the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program, which is described in the technical note for Forest Area and Ownership. These data do not include information on private lands that are legally reserved from harvest, such as lands held by private groups like The Nature Conservancy. In addition, many “natural” and “semi-natural” lands are at times reserved from harvest because of administrative or other restrictions.

We hope that, in future reports, it will be possible to report on the existence of protected or reserved areas on a broader range of land ownerships. One dataset being developed for this purpose will report the acreage of lands according to a system of categorizing management intensity developed by the U.S. Geological Survey Gap Analysis Program (see http://www.gap.uidaho.edu/handbook/Stewardship/default.htm). This database is currently under development by the Conservation Biology Institute in conjunction with the USDA Forest Service; see http://www.consbio.org/cbi/what/pad.htm.

Note that “interior Alaska” includes all forests except the Southeast Coast area up to and including the Kenai Peninsula. Thus, “interior” includes areas that may not be thought of as part of Alaska’s interior, yet they are included because of their remoteness. The acreage shown here for interior Alaska (about 113 million acres) does not include the Tongas National Forest (about 12 million acres). Note also that there is an apparent drop in interior Alaska acres in 1997; however, the 2-million-acre decrease came about from a reclassification, not a true loss of forest.

2003 Web Site Update: Data for 2002 were added in this update. Data were acquired from the forest service and are available on the Web at http://fia.fs.fed.us. There was an apparent drop in “interior Alaska” acreage from 1997 to 2002, however, this is because of reclassification of acreage into the “reserved forest land” from the “other natural/semi-natural forest land” category.