Chris Woodall

​President Biden’s executive order, ‘Strengthening the Nation's Forests, Communities, and Local Economies,’ (EO#14072, April 22, 2022) acknowledges the interest in mature and old-growth (MOG) forests by directing U.S. Federal agencies to consistently define and inventory these resources including sampling errors on United States Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. We address this Presidential Order by estimating old-growth forests as a cross walk between local old-growth field surveys and the official inventory of US forests (USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis) to achieve national consistency then defining mature forests as a growth stage prior to the onset of identified old-growth attributes within a proposed Forest Inventory Growth Stage System (FIGSS). Such a quantification system is based on a variety of components that could be used to account for cultural values ascribed to forest conditions which could be refined across future versions such as assumptions about the relative length of growth stages, incorporating data from emerging monitoring technologies along with old-growth/mature field sampling campaigns, accommodating spectrums of site-limited and/or disturbance-driven stand development, and refined variable selection processes such as machine-learning.

Speaker Biography

Christopher Woodall is the National Program Leader for forest carbon quantification research in the Research and Development (R&D) deputy area of the US Forest Service, Washington, DC.  Since 2021, Woodall has served at R&D’s national office as a technical lead on various emerging national and international forest topics including: European Union Deforestation Regulations, Executive Order #14072 Mature and Old-Growth Classification, Interagency Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification Team, and USDA Entity Scale GHG Methods for Forests. Prior to this assignment, Woodall served as a Research Forester, Group Leader, and Project Leader with the US Forest Service’s Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program and a Northern Experimental Forest Research Work Unit over a span of twenty years where his research and leadership centered on implementing FIA’s national inventory of dead wood and fuels, strategic scale forest density assessments, adaptive silviculture, carbon accounting, and tree regeneration in the context of associated range dynamics. He holds a BS in Forestry from Clemson University and MS/Ph.D. in Silviculture from the University of Montana.