Maintenance of productive capacity of forest ecosystems

This chapter reports projected changes in forest area, age, volume, biomass, number of trees, and removals from 2010 to 2060 for alternative scenarios that bracket a range of possible future socioeconomic and climate conditions in the Northern United States, which consists of 20 central and northeastern States. As described in Chapter 2, the scenarios incorporate different assumptions about population growth, economic development, land-use change, carbon emissions, and climate change. Changes in forest attributes over time for each scenario were estimated using the Forest Dynamics Model (Wear et al. 2013). The information presented in this chapter, more than any other, is directly derived from projections of changing forest conditions for each scenario as modeled by the Forest Dynamics Model.