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Essential FVS: a User's Guide to the Forest Vegetation Simulator

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Essential FVS: a User's Guide to the Forest Vegetation Simulator United States Department of Agriculture Essential FVS: Forest Service Forest Management A User’s Guide to the Service Center Fort Collins, CO Forest Vegetation Simulator 2002 Revised: June, 2021 Gary E. Dixon i ABSTRACT Dixon, Gary E. comp. 2002. Essential FVS: A user’s guide to the Forest Vegetation Simulator. Internal Rep. Fort Collins, CO: U. S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Management Service Center. 226p. (Revised: June 4, 2021) This document synthesizes information in various users’ guides relating to the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS), and updates that information to be consistent with current model capabilities. This guide explains FVS data input requirements, the keyword system, model output interpretation, timing of management options, simulating management scenarios, regeneration, event monitor use, conditionally scheduling activities, creating custom output variables, model calibration to local stand conditions, model multipliers, policy labeling, basic component model theory, available extensions, and lists common problems and their solution. This document is meant to serve as an initial reference for people of all skill levels with the FVS model. Keywords: Forest Vegetation Simulator, forest management, simulation models, resource management. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gary E. Dixon (retired) is a biometrician and served as the Forest Vegetation Simulator Group leader at the Washington Office’s Forest Management Service Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. Dr. Dixon received his B.S. (1973), M.S. (1974), and Ph.D. (1977) in forest biometrics at Colorado State University. He has worked on the development of tree growth models throughout most of his career. He joined the Forest Management Staff in 1982 and has worked with the model now known as the Forest Vegetation Simulator since that time. He retired from the Forest Service in 2008 but still actively participates in FVS development. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all those people that contributed to the preparation of this manual. Several colleagues have provided excellent technical reviews. In particular, I would like to thank Al Stage, Dennis Ferguson, Bill Wykoff, Nick Crookston, Bob Monserud, Michael Van Dyck, and Drew McMahan for their thorough and thoughtful suggestions. I would like to thank the authors, whose words appear here, for allowing the reproduction of their work in this document. I would like to thank colleagues at the Forestry Sciences Lab in Moscow, Idaho, and the Forest Management Service Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, for contributing to the continued development, testing, and support of the FVS software system. And finally I would like to thank the many FVS users that have provided feedback and suggestions for improving the model. Without the help of all these people, FVS would not be the powerful system that it is today. ABOUT THIS GUIDE This document is meant to update and enhance the set of General Technical Reports and Research Papers published by the Intermountain and the Rocky Mountain Research Stations, and other reference material relating to the Forest Vegetation Simulator. It is intended to bring together the essential parts of those documents, update certain portions, and serve as a basic reference for the general FVS user. This document contains portions of these publications verbatim. The original set of publications should still serve as the main technical reference for this model. HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE Anyone reading this document should also have the “Keyword Reference Guide for the Forest Vegetation Simulator” at hand. This can be downloaded from the Forest Management Service Center’s web site. When a keyword is mentioned in this document, it should be looked up in the keyword guide for a detailed discussion of the parameter fields and other explanatory notes. Any references in this document to the “Keyword Guide” are referencing this document. Users should also obtain the FVS overview document for the variant specific to their geographic area from the same web site. With those two documents, plus this one, users should have a good start towards understanding and running FVS. Users wanting to interact with FVS using a graphical user interface should obtain that software along with the “exercise guide” pertaining to their geographic area. These products are also available from the FMSC web site. FOREWORD The following discussion briefly chronicles the development of the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS). To credit everyone that contributed to program development would require much more than the available space—we apologize for the omissions. The intent, however, is to portray the vision, the cooperation, and the commitment of time and energy that are required to develop and gain acceptance for a large-scale forest management tool. FVS, and the suite of tools that support it, are the products of hundreds of contributors over a 30-year period. At present, there are more than 20 variants that represent conditions in a majority of forestlands in the United States. FVS is descended from the Prognosis Model, which was conceived by Al Stage (1973) and developed for forest conditions in the northern Rocky Mountains by Stage’s Research Work Unit within the USDA Forest Service Intermountain Research Station. Stage envisioned a stand-oriented forest growth projection system that was closely tied to a forest inventory system and could accommodate nearly any factor that might influence stand development. The first production version of Prognosis (Wykoff, Stage, and Crookston 1982) was limited to existing trees, and included models that predicted large-tree height and diameter increment, small-tree height and diameter increment, tree mortality, and crown change. This version incorporated a wide range of management options, but these options were more-or-less limited to different schemes for harvesting trees. Stage provided overall direction for Prognosis development and also designed and fit the large- tree height growth models (Stage 1975). Dave Hamilton, Jr. led the effort to develop mortality models (Hamilton and Edwards 1976) and Chuck Hatch (University of Idaho) developed the crown change model (Hatch 1980). Bill Wykoff developed small-tree growth models and the large-tree diameter increment model (Wykoff 1983), and was responsible for managing code development and designing the thinning algorithms. Nick Crookston was responsible for much of the computer coding and designed the keyword system that controls the input of program options. This version of the Prognosis Model represented the 11 commercial species and most of the growing conditions that occur on forests in western Montana, northern Idaho, and eastern Washington. It also permitted thinning simulations with a broad array of tree removal strategies. Before the first public release of Prognosis, work was already underway to expand the model’s capabilities. Dennis Ferguson led the development of a regeneration establishment model (Ferguson, Stage, and Boyd 1986; Ferguson and Crookston 1984), which permitted simulation of regeneration treatments. Melinda Moeur (1985) produced models that predicted shrub development and also provided descriptions of the vertical distribution of tree and shrub canopies. Nick Crookston and others (Crookston, Roelke, Burnell, and Stage 1978) developed the Mountain Pine Beetle Model, and Bob Monserud and Nick Crookston (Monserud and Crookston 1982) linked the Douglas-fir Tussock Moth Model to Prognosis. Crookston also developed the Event Monitor (Crookston 1985), which allowed management activities to be scheduled conditional on the level of virtually any state variable within the Prognosis system. The Event Monitor paved the way for the Parallel Processing Extension (Crookston and Stage 1991), which permitted the simultaneous projection of multiple stands, with treatments scheduled in accord with broad management policies. Scientists at the University of Idaho also contributed to Prognosis improvements. Cooperative studies provided data for the Regeneration Establishment Model, the small-tree growth models, and the shrub and cover models. In addition, Lee Medema and Chuck Hatch developed CHEAPO (Medema and Hatch 1982), which provided for economic evaluation of management alternatives. Although Al Stage retired in 1994, he remained an active participant in Prognosis development until his death in 2008. The group he long directed continued development of Prognosis for the northern Rocky Mountains. More recent developments included extensions for western spruce budworm, mountain pine beetle, western root diseases, dwarf mistletoe, fire effects, and white pine blister rust. Growth models have been continually refined (Wykoff 1990; Hamilton 1986, 1990, Stage and Wykoff 1998), the Regeneration Establishment Model was revised to include a broader range of habitat types (Ferguson and Carlson 1993), CHEAPO was revised (Horn, Medema, and Schuster 1986), and the capabilities of the Event Monitor were greatly expanded (Crookston 1990). Work to expand Prognosis to other geographic areas also began before the first public release of Prognosis. Ralph Johnson was hired as a mensurationist with the USDA Forest Service Northern Region in 1978, and worked closely with the Moscow team to develop a Prognosis variant for eastern Montana. Nelson Loftus, Richard Fitzgerald, and Carl Purri, all worked for National Forest System (NFS) Timber Management in the Washington Office (WO) and had visions of a national framework for growth and yield modeling.
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