Elers Koch, a key figure in the early days of the U.S. Forest Service, was among the first American-trained silviculturists, a pioneering forest manager, and a master firefighter. By horse and on foot, he helped establish the boundaries of most of our national forests in the West, designed new fire-control strategies and equipment, and served during the formative years of the agency. Forty Years a Forester, Koch’s entertaining and illuminating memoir, reveals one remarkable man’s contributions to the incipient science of forest management and his role in building the human relationships and policies that helped make the U.S. Forest Service, prior to World War II, the most respected bureau in the federal government. This new, fully annotated edition of Koch’s memoir offers an unparalleled look at the Forest Service’s formative ambitions to regulate the national forests and grasslands and reminds us of the principled commitment that Koch and his peers exemplified as they built the national forest system and nurtured the essential conservation ethic that continues to guide our use of the public lands.

Forest Analytics with R combines practical, down-to-earth forestry data analysis and solutions to real forest management challenges with state-of-the-art statistical and data-handling functionality. The authors adopt a problem-driven approach, in which statistical and mathematical tools are introduced in the context of the forestry problem that they can help to resolve. All the tools are introduced in the context of real forestry datasets, which provide compelling examples of practical applications. The modeling challenges covered within the book include imputation and interpolation for spatial data, fitting probability density functions to tree measurement data using maximum likelihood, fitting allometric functions using both linear and non-linear least-squares regression, and fitting growth models using both linear and non-linear mixed-effects modeling. The coverage also includes deploying and using forest growth models written in compiled languages, analysis of natural resources and forestry inventory data, and forest estate planning and optimization using linear programming. The book would be ideal for a one-semester class in forest biometrics or applied statistics for natural resources management. The text assumes no programming background, some introductory statistics, and very basic applied mathematics.