Matt Russell is a forest data scientist with Arbor Analytics based in St. Albans.

How long would it take a forester to measure 1 million trees? In the case of Maine’s forests, about 60 years.

That was my experience when working with the U.S. Forest Service’s Penobscot Experimental Forest, a 3,900-acre experimental forest and located in Bradley and Eddington that began conducting research in the 1950s. An integral part of that research was remeasuring the same trees on sample plots through time.

The data from the Penobscot could tell you exactly when a tree transitioned from being a seedling, sapling and mature tree, and when it might have fallen in a storm. After compiling the entire data record of tree measurements that occurred on the forest into a single database, a task that had never been done before, we realized there would soon be 1 million tree measurements recorded on the Penobscot.

The tremendous volume of data that has been collected at the Penobscot has formed a baseline of ecological knowledge that is unmatched. The Penobscot contains one of the longest-running studies in North America examining how forest management influences forest dynamics in northern conifer forests. Its long-term data have made it internationally recognized across forest science.

Similarly, the Massabesic Experimental Forest located in Lyman has conducted long-term research on oak-pine forests, a prevalent forest type on private family forest ownerships across southern New England.

Experimental forests and ranges like the Penobscot and Massabesic provide data that cannot be replaced and are needed to understand how our forests respond to management and environmental stresses. Without the resources to continue the foundational data collection efforts at its experimental forests, Maine will lose its ability to respond to future forest health threats like spruce budworm and the emerald ash borer.

With the recent announcement of the U.S. Forest Service’s reorganization, many experimental forests are left in a state of uncertainty. Facilities at the nearby Bartlett Experimental Forest in New Hampshire have been announced to close. The decision on facilities at the Penobscot and Massabesic experimental forests remain under evaluation.

The investments in long-term research that have been made at Maine’s experimental forests would deteriorate if facilities were closed and funding is reduced. Research installations need to be maintained by researchers and technicians who are based on site to ensure timely collection of data. The data collected from long-term experiments can quickly become outdated if not curated in a way that scientists and managers can make use of them, including in cloud computing and machine learning applications, now standard tools used by forest analysts.

Investing in this “blue-collar research” ensures that the foundational data from our forests can be leveraged in research applications in an AI-driven world. Developers of new technologies using remote sensing technology such as satellite imagery and lidar often look to experimental forest datasets first to ground-truth how well their data product performs.

For example, determining how well a lidar-based inventory predicts forest biomass across a landscape requires quality data collected on the ground. Without these foundational datasets, new technologies that monitor and report on our natural resources will be left unchecked with no calibration or validation with real world data.

Research and development funds available in the forestry sector have been in decline in recent decades, particularly at the federal level. Additional facility closures and reductions in funding will shift the burden of research to the private forest sector. This is ironic because the private forest sector has largely relied on research from experimental forests to inform its own forest management strategies.

Replicating the long-term research that has occurred on Maine’s experimental forests is simply an impossible task for the near term. Experimental forests and ranges operated by the U.S. Forest Service should continue to collect and provide foundational forest data and research insights to researchers and managers in Maine’s forests. Let’s support those foresters to measure another million trees.