Tree Country SC

Tree Country SC is an employee newsletter released by the South Carolina Forestry Commission

Tree Country SC

Tree Country SC is an employee newsletter released by the South Carolina Forestry Commission

Annual report FY 2017-2018

Each year the South Carolina Forestry Commission produces an annual report for the South Carolina General Assembly. This report details the summary of accomplishments for the fiscal year and recommendations for the future. Also included is information concerning administration, finances, forest protection, education, and applied forestry

Management of non-native tree species in forests of the Alpine space

This guide was prepared within the framework of the project ALPTREES (code ASP791), which is co-funded by the European Commission through the INTERREG Alpine Space financial mechanism. The INTERREG Alpine Space programme is a European transnational cooperation programme for the Alpine region. It provides a framework for facilitating cooperation between key economic, social, and environmental players in seven Alpine countries, as well as between various institutional levels. The programme is financed through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as well as through national public and private co-funding in the Partner States

South Carolina's statewide forest resource assessment and strategy

This Statewide Forest Resource Assessment was developed as a first step in identifying and quantifying the issues that face our state’s forests and to assist in focusing reduced Commission capacity on the most important tasks. During this process, resource management experts and forestry-related organizations came together and prioritized these challenges so that strategies could be formulated. Also included are links to other resources

Landscape management plan state of South Carolina

A landscape management plan (LMP) is a vital and innovative tool, offering a wide array of benefits and opportunities to landowners, foresters, and other natural resource professionals, state and federal agencies, conservation partners, and others. This LMP is designed to complement and align with federal, state, and local laws. Resources in this LMP do not override local forestry regulations that may not be addressed directly in this plan

FY 2019-2020 annual report

Each year the South Carolina Forestry Commission produces an annual report for the South Carolina General Assembly. This report details the summary of accomplishments for the fiscal year and recommendations for the future. Also included is information concerning administration, finances, forest protection, education, and applied forestry

FY 2021-2022 annual report

Each year the South Carolina Forestry Commission produces an annual report for the South Carolina General Assembly. This report details the summary of accomplishments for the fiscal year and recommendations for the future. Also included is information concerning administration, finances, forest protection, education, and applied forestry

Monitoring canopy quality and improving equitable outcomes of urban tree planting using LiDAR and machine learning

Urban tree canopies are fundamental to mitigating the impacts of climate change within cities as well as providing a range of other important ecosystem, health, and amenity benefits. However, urban tree planting initiatives do not typically utilize data about both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the tree canopy, despite height being a critical determinant of the quality and value of urban canopy cover. We present a novel pipeline that uses airborne LiDAR data to train a multi-task machine learning model to generate estimates of both canopy cover and height in urban areas. We apply this to multi-source multi-spectral imagery for the case study of Chicago, USA. Our results indicate that a multi-task UNet convolutional neural network can be used to generate reliable estimates of canopy cover and height from aerial and satellite imagery. We then use these canopy estimates to allocate 75,000 trees from Chicago's recent green initiative under four scenarios, minimizing the urban heat island effect and then optimizing for an equitable canopy distribution, comparing results when only canopy cover is used, and when both canopy cover and height are considered. Through the introduction of this novel pipeline, we show that including canopy height within decision-making processes allows the distribution of new trees to be optimised to further reduce the urban heat island effect in localities where trees have the highest cooling potential and allows trees to be more equitably distributed to communities with lower quality canopies