Oak Woodland Monitoring — Abstract of Paper


Inventory of Oaks on California’s National Forest Lands
Thomas Gaman¹ and Kevin Casey²


California has 18+ million acres of land owned by the USDA Forest Service. This is almost 20 percent of the area of the state. From 1994-2000 the Region 5 Remote Sensing Lab collected forest, vegetation and fuels inventory data from thousands of permanent monitoring plots established on diverse sites on Forest Service lands throughout the region. The plots are stratified among 165 vegetation types, or strata. Collectively, these data are known as the Regional Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) database. An analysis of the plot data for California’s oak, including species, distribution and stocking is presented. These wild lands are rich in many species of oak. Based upon the FIA survey, there are 433 million (+/– 1 percent) oak trees over 5 inches in diameter on Forest Service lands in California. Eleven percent of all trees on the Region 5 ownerships are species of the genus Quercus or Lithocarpus. They can be expected to be encountered on 87 strata which collectively occupy 11.5 million acres of land. Sixty-three strata, together comprising 6.6 million acres, have combined average oak basal area greater than 5 square feet per acre.