PERSEUS
Promoting Economic Resilience and Sustainability of the Eastern U.S. Forests (PERSEUS)
PERSEUS will use an integrated transdisciplinary approach to provide scientifically sound information, outreach, and educational opportunities that will lay the foundation for a long-term paradigm shift in forestry toward data-driven, AI-supported forest management systems that increase both the provision of ecosystem services and operational efficiency. The project encompasses the northern hardwood forest in the northeast, the central hardwood region, and the southern pine and mixed hardwood.
Project Goals
Eastern US forests provide critical ecosystem services, but their long-term sustainability is increasingly threatened by climate change, evolving markets, and other associated factors. In response, more refined and immediate information is needed to allow land managers to make informed decisions that will affect the delivery, sustainability, and resilience of forest resources. Data for forest management is still primarily derived from conventional methods, which are infeasible over large areas and require considerable manual effort. Our data-driven, stakeholder-informed framework will provide a “digital bridge” enabling both multi-objective optimization at the landowner-scale for practical tactics (e.g., species selection) and multi-stakeholder simulation and tradeoff analysis at the regional scale for informed decision and policy-making. Complementing this, our educational programs will generate a diverse workforce capable of carrying these tools into the future. Impact will include enhanced productivity and ecosystem services with a simultaneous decrease in losses due to environmental challenges.
Project Partners
The PERSEUS research team will work cross-institutionally to construct and apply an integrated digital framework for modeling current and future forest ecosystem service trends at the landowner-scale, so that landowners will have data upon which to base their forest management decisions.
| Dr. Songlin Fei Project Investigator Profressor & Dean’s Chair of Remote Sensing Director, Integrated Digital Forestry sfei@purdue.edu | Dr. Aaron Weiskittel Co-PI Director, Center for Research on Sustainable Forests aaron.weiskittel@maine.edu | Dr. Pete Bettinger Co-PI Hargreaves Distinguished Professor pbettinger@warnell.uga.edu |