Embedded Files
The INSPIRES project brings together over 40 multi-disciplinary collaborative faculty from the Universities of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. They seek to develop a flexible Digital Forest Framework that integrates and analyzes data from many sources across the Northern Forest Region (NFR) to better understand forest ecosystem integrity and resilience. This work will help us understand how the NFR may respond to climate variability, atmospheric pollution, altered disturbance intensity from contrasting stressors, varying land use, and changes in regulatory policies.
As part of the INSPIRES project, eight teachers and five researchers from the Maine Center for Research in STEM Education (RiSE Center) began working together to develop lessons for the classroom focused on forestry and Quantitative Reasoning in Context (QRC). This aspect of the project focuses on exploring how to support students’ quantitative reasoning skills in the context of forestry. As part of that effort, we have worked to curate a collection of student-friendly datasets and resources using actual data collected by scientists at various experimental forests throughout the NFR.
The Northern Forest Region (NFR) and Big Data
The Northern Forest Region (NFR) and Big Data
NFR covers 26 million acres and is home to over 2 million people. It stretches from Maine through northern New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York.
NFR is a highly diverse and transitional ecosystem with a history of natural disturbance and mixed land use.
Land use pressures, invasive pests, and abiotic stressors are rising.
Current forest-related information varies, ranging from coarse national-scale coverage to incomplete and often sparse regional and local coverage.
The limited and rather patchy availability of ecological data makes it challenging to observe changes across this vast expanse of forest.
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