Welcome to the climate change tree atlas. We have presented in the following pages tremendous amount of information including distribution maps and tables for different climate change scenarios, life-history and disturbance attributes, ecological attributes, forest type maps and sorted list of species importance values by state/county for different climate change scenarios,  and more for 80 species in the eastern half of the United States (east of the 100th meridian)!!

The products presented in this atlas were a result of a modelling effort that involved the use of USDA Forest Service's Forest Inventory Data, numerous environmental variables gleaned from various sources and 2xCO₂ equilibrium climate variables provided by five Global Circulation Models (GCMs) - ie., GISS, GFDL, Hadley, UKMO and CCC. You can compare the GCM predicted climate with the current.

We have tried to provide you information on a "need to know" basis without cluttering the pages with too much detail. Context-sensitive help is available in order to ease your browsing pains. Before you delve into the atlas, make sure that you read the relevant material first, so as not to get lost in the sea of information. You can get a quick overview of the kind of questions answered by the atlas.
 

You may be bewildered by the number of choices presented to you in the atlas. However, we have attempted to organize the information in a meaningful way and provide you helpful links with the hope that you'll find what you want quickly. Please spend a couple of minutes in the beginning to read some background material.
As you browse the atlas (links deliberately not provided in this section), 

For background material & organization, click on 

If you run into problems, or have a question, click on 

Before making sense of the distribution maps, click on . 

Abbreviations & acronyms are explained by clicking .

If you want to search the atlas database click on

Make use of the context-sensitive help buttons provided.

How to cite this web page:
Prasad, A. M. and L. R. Iverson. 1999-ongoing. A Climate Change Atlas for 80 Forest Tree Species of the Eastern United States [database]. http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/delaware/atlas/index.html, Northeastern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Delaware, Ohio.

Hard copy version of the climate change tree atlas:
Iverson, L. R., A. M. Prasad, B. J. Hale, and E. K. Sutherland. 1999. An atlas of current and potential future distributions of common trees of the eastern United States. General Technical Report NE-265. Northeastern Research Station, USDA Forest Service. 245 pp. (Contact Anantha Prasad for a copy)

Published articles related to the work:
DeHays, D. H., G. L. Jacobson, P. G. Schaber, B. Bongarten, L. R. Iverson, and A. Kieffenbacker-Krall. 2000. Forest responses to changing climate: lessons from the past and uncertainty for the future. Pages 495-540 in R. A. Mickler, R. A. Birdsey, and J. L. Hom, editors. Responses of northern forests to environmental change. Springer-Verlag, Ecological Studies Series vol. 139, New York, NY.

Easterling, M. M., D. R. DeWalle, L. R. Iverson, A. M. Prasad, A. Z. Rose, A. R. Buda, and Y. Cao. 2000. The potential impacts of climate change and variability on forests and forestry in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Climate Research 14:195-206.

Hansen, M.H., Frieswyk, T., Glover, J.F., and Kelly, J.F. 1992. The Eastwide forest inventory data base: users manual. General Technical Report NC-151,U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, North Central Forest Experiment Station. St. Paul, MN. 48 pp.

Hanson, A. J., V. Dale, C Flather, R. P. Neilson, P. Bartlein, L. Iverson, and D. Currie. 2001. Global change in forests: interactions among biodiversity, climate, and land use. BioScience 51(9):765-779.

Iverson, L. R. and A. M. Prasad. 2001. Potential changes in tree species richness and forest community types following climate change. Ecosystems 4:200-215.

Iverson, L. R. Prasad A. M. and M. W. Schwartz. 1999. Modeling potential future individual tree-species distributions in the Eastern United States under a climate change scenario: a case study with Pinus virginiana. Ecological Modelling 115:77-93.

Iverson, L. R. and A. M. Prasad. 2001. Potential tree species shifts with five climate change scenarios in the Eastern United States. Forest Ecology and Management 155(1-3).

Iverson, L. R. and A. M. Prasad. 1998. Predicting abundance of 80 tree species following climate change in the eastern United States. Ecological Monographs 68:465-485. (Ecological Monographs paper)

McNulty, S. G., J. A. Moore, L. R. Iverson, A. Prasad, R. Abt, B. Smith, G. Sun, M. Gavazzi, J. Bartlett, B. Murray, R. A. Mickler, and J. D. Aber. 2000. Application of linked regional scale growth, biogeography, and economic models for southeastern United States pine forests. World Resources Review 12:298-320.

Prasad, A. and Iverson, L. R. 1997. Modelling tree distributions in eastern United States using Arc/Info GIS and S-PLUS statistical package. Pages (http://www.esri.com/library/userconf/proc97/PROC97/TO200/PAP200/P200.HTM) in Proceedings, 1997 Arc/Info Conference. Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.  Redlands, California. 

Prasad, A. M. and L. R. Iverson. 2000. Predictive vegetation mapping using a custom built model-chooser: comparison of regression tree analysis and multivariate adaptive regression splines. In. Proceedings CD-ROM. 4th International Conference on Integrating GIS and Environmental Modeling: Problems, Prospects and Research Needs. http://www.colorado.edu/research/cires/banff/upload/159/index.html, Banff, Alberta, Canada.

Schwartz, M. W., L. R. Iverson, and A. M. Prasad. 2001. Predicting the potential future distribution of four tree species in Ohio, USA, using current habitat availability and climatic forcing. Ecosystems.

Sutherland, E. K., B. J. Hale, and D. M. Hix. 2000. Defining species guilds in the Central Hardwood Forest, USA. Plant Ecology 147:1-19.

Elaine Kennedy Sutherland and Betsy Hale provided data on life history attributes and disturbance response. Funding was provided by the Northern Global Change Research Program, directed by Rich Birdsey and John Hom. Reviews of this web site were provided by Chip Scott, Todd Hutchinson, Eric Gustafson and Dan Yaussy. Mary Boda provided support for many aspects of this work. We are very thankful to all of them.

This work would not have been possible without the tremendous effort by the USDA Forest Service's Forest Inventory Analysis crew who gathered data for over 3 million trees in over 100,000 plots (for the region east of the 100th meridian, conducted by the North Central, Northeastern, Southern and Southeastern Research stations) and presented it in a format usable by modellers (please see Hansen et al. in the Citations section).

The atlas was implemented on the web by Anantha Prasad.