Forest floor bulk density and depth at Savannah River - Draft Final Report.

Knowing the amount of biomass across a landscape is becoming increasingly important to fire managers as new fuel and fire management decision support systems come on line. Fire managers rarely have the time or funding available to sample fuels operationally and often depend upon mean values for critical variables whose variation is often associated with simple stand characteristics such as age, forest type, time since last burn, stocking, or site, and other easily measured variables. This report outlines a study to collect and analyze litter and duff bulk density samples for developing a simple predictive tool to estimate forest floor fuel loading based on simple stand characteristics.