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FORAST (FOREST RESPONSES TO ANTHROPOGENIC STRESS) DATA BASE DOCUMENTATION
Citation:
McLaughlin, S., D. Downing, T. Blasing, B. Jackson, AND D. Pack. FORAST (FOREST RESPONSES TO ANTHROPOGENIC STRESS) DATA BASE DOCUMENTATION. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/3-87/029A.
Description:
The report has been prepared to (1) document the objectives, experimental design, and data collection protocols for a 3-year study of growth patterns of forest trees in the eastern U.S. and (2) describe how data derived from the study are stored and may be accessed from a magnetic computer tape. The tape (master tape serial number X09410-ORNL) is available through the Environmental Protection Agency, the principal sponsor of the study. The FORAST project, from which these data are derived, was initiated as exploratory research to document patterns of radial growth of forest trees during the past > 50 years, within a 15-state area of the eastern United States. An addition objective was the examination of potential influences of a variety of natural and anthropogenic parameters on the spatial and temporal pattern of those changes. Persuant to those objectives, radial growth measurements from over 7,000 trees are reported in association with data on a variety of measurements and calculated indices of characteristics (basal area, density, and competitive indices), climate (temperature, precipitation, and drought), and anthropogenic pollutants (state and regional emissions of SO2 and NOx, O3 monitoring data, and frequency of atmospheric stagnation episodes and atmospheric haze). It is hoped that compilation of these data into a single data base will facilitate exploratory analysis of tree growth patterns and responses to local and regional environmental conditions. The authors suggest that at the time such analyses be viewed as providing a framework for hypothesis formulation and testing in further, more focused research and not as confirmatory evidence of cause and effect relationships.