Forest Service

Forest Service law enforcement officers Nicholas Scholz and Patrick Legg helped find the needle in a 2 million-acre haystack. The needle was a 5-month-old infant, and the haystack is the Lolo National Forest in Montana. Last week, the officers were each honored as an Unsung Hero for their work in...

Fire seasons have lengthened so much that we now use the term fire year, firefighting costs are breaking new records, and loss of life and property are part of an alarming new pattern. The ability to mitigate these impacts with community collaboration is critically important.

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke. Air quality impacts from wildfires have become significant health events and are now, in fact, the greatest source of air pollution exposure faced by the American public. In addition, as wildfires increase in duration, communities often face multiple weeks of...

Sometimes reaching a height of more than 100 feet tall with trunk diameters often well over 10 feet, the American chestnut was the giant of the eastern U.S. forests. There were once billions of them and their range stretched from Georgia and Alabama to Michigan, but the majestic tree was gone before...

The United States forest products industry accounts for approximately four percent of the nation’s total manufacturing GDP, producing over $200 billion in products every year. To keep tabs on the condition and status of America’s forest resources over time, the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory...

“Resilience” is the ability to recover from change, or when you think about landscapes, the ability to recover from disturbances like wildfires. A new model takes the idea of resilience and applies it to the natural environment, specifically, to sagebrush. This resilience model is one of the core...

Why are Rocky Mountain Research Station scientists sampling tree rings in the Pinaleño Mountains of southeast Arizona? Because tree ring samples reveal the history of fire. When fire scorches a tree, the tree floods its wound with sap, which protects the wound from wood rot decay for hundreds of...

Canada Lynx, hikers, and snowmobile enthusiasts can co-exist on national forests, according to a conclusion reached by USDA Forest Service researchers who published the first ever study of the impacts of recreationists on Canada Lynx movements (PDF, 1.3 MB).

This week, the U.S. Forest Service commemorates International Day of Forests and its 2019 theme Forests and Education with the 75 th birthday of the iconic forest educator, Smokey Bear. While Smokey Bear’s influence in the United States is remarkable, he is also an inspiration to forest mascots...

USDA is proud to share stories of women in agriculture who are leading the industry and helping other women succeed along the way. In this blog, we feature Sandra “Sandy” Watts, USDA Forest Service Region 3 Deputy Regional Forester in Albuquerque, New Mexico.