Forest Structure

Overview

Forest structure refers to the physical characteristics of the forest environment related to tree size, height, and canopy as well as understory vegetation and woody debris on the forest floor. These structural attributes vary widely as a function of forest succession after disturbance and often have profound influences on habitat quality for forest-associated species. TerrAdapt:Cascadia currently models 3 attributes of forest structure across our region, including % canopy cover, tree diameter, and tree height.

In the following sections, we describe the training data and covariates we used to predict these forest structural attributes, our approach to developing the models, and model validation.