Virginia's forests, 2007

Abstract

Between 2002 and 2007, the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program conducted the eighth inventory of the forests of Virginia. About 15.7 million acres, or 62 percent, of Virginia was forested. The majority (12.4 million acres) of Virginia’s forest land was in nonindustrial private forest ownership. Public ownership and forest industry ranked second and third, with 2.8 and 0.6 million acres, respectively. Red maple dominated the number of live stems (? 1.0 inch d.b.h.) with 1.4 billion stems (13 percent of total). Loblolly pine was second, with 1.0 billion live stems. While yellow-poplar was the most dominate species for live-tree volume with 5.0 billion cubic feet (15 percent of total), as a genus, oaks accounted for 33 percent of the live-tree volume (10.8 billion cubic feet). Biomass of coarse woody debris on forest health plots averaged 2.9 tons per acre for the State. The amount of carbon in coarse woody debris and fine woody debris averaged 1.4 and 1.7 tons per acre, respectively. The Forest Service’s FIA is the only program that conducts forest assessments across all land in the United States. Increasing demands on the resource and anthropogenic-related impacts on forests have intensified the need to conduct ecosystem-based inventories such as these.