Forest and Friends - April 30, 2026
Yes, we missed March and are just catching the last day of April, but we’re back! There has been a lot of news, especially around the recently announced USFS reorganization to go over in person, this will be a great first session and a new location: Capitol Hill’s Stoup (Line 2 making it easier to get across from the Eastside).
Last month I used my own product to go hug a tree, not just any tree but a specific tree with an unreasonably large diameter for the landscape. It might be hard to read the sizes and distances here from the above image, we’re 125’ away from that double stem looking through a 20BAF prism. This stem was reported as 70” diameter, which is wrong. In the above image we’re in Sierra Mixed Conifer, in a plantation, in a second thinning situation, so 70” would be extraordinary but not impossible. We assumed we were wrong and went looking for the record, expecting a low-union (or a vehicle) being tagged as a single stem. We found a low-union that, by the book, is a single stem of 62”, in practice represents two stems of 48” and 28” diameters, and a bug in our algorithm to account for the extreme asymmetry of this trunk (significant difference between major and minor axis). The convention of DBH has a real impact on computed factors for a stand, such as carbon intensity or basal area – counting this as a single stem yields 25% more than counting them as separate stems. It’s a problem!
All in all, it was a great trip into a wildfire reduction project to visit a post-thinned forest. Because they are using a 20BAF prism they are over-estimating their basal area, leaving a lot more on the landscape than the prescription. This means more competition for light and water, less resilience, and greater residual fire risk than desired. At the limit the prism technique will get it right, but practice falls far short of that theoretical limit – we need more practicable tools in more people’s hands.
Feel free to join us for pizza and a pint as we talk about climate! We’ll be geeking out, enjoying the taplist, menu, and friendship while we talk forests, startups, GIS, policy, etc. I’ll be wearing a hardhat and cruising vest – feel free to walk right up and join our table.