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Field Work: Crunching Data with Biometrician Ken Laustsen

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Ken Laustsen began his career in forestry measuring trees out in the field; today he keeps a watchful eye on Maine’s forests from his office as the state’s biometrician. Photo by Joe Rankin.

A big-city reporter called one day wanting to know how many sugar maple trees there are in Maine – and how Maine compared to Vermont, a state virtually synonymous with syrup production. It took Ken Laustsen five minutes: 644 million sugar maples in Maine, 453 million in Vermont.

“He was very happy because he could say that Maine has more maples than Vermont, which was the point he wanted to make,” said Laustsen.

Laustsen can tell you how many grade-one white pines there are in, say, Kennebec County. Or the percentage of Maine’s forest that is ash. Or which county has the most spruce trees. Once, he walked a dad helping his daughter with her homework through the six-step equation to find how much carbon dioxide is bound up in a tree.

Laustsen is the state biometrician; an employee of the Maine Forest Service. It’s an undeniably geeky title that gets him some quizzical looks. “I tell them it means, ‘measures of biology,’” he said.

Does every state have a biometrician on the state payroll? Hardly. Maine is one of only two, said Laustsen. Any guesses on the other? Texas. There are other biometricians out there; the U.S. Forest Service employs a number and some private land-management companies have them. Still, it’s a niche profession.

Laustsen didn’t start out with a degree in biometrics (yes, there are such things). He worked his way into it. He’s always been a statistically inclined sort of guy – at least since high school, when an inspirational math teacher challenged him to create a game of chance as a way to teach probability and statistics. Laustsen went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in forest management and got to develop his interest in statistics during 24 years working for the now-defunct Great Northern Paper Company. “I spent a large portion of my early career measuring trees. And then going back and measuring the same trees again. I was measuring for change,” he said.

He joined the state payroll in the late 1990s after the state got serious about collecting and interpreting forest resource data in the wake of controversies and legislative and regulatory battles over clear-cutting and liquidation harvesting practices. In 2000, he issued Maine’s first comprehensive forest inventory analysis.

The data that Laustsen works with is gathered as part of the nationwide Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA), an ongoing statistical cataloging effort coordinated by the U.S. Forest Service.

The state gathers tree data – species, diameter of trees greater than five inches, health status, and much more – from 3,500 plots scattered across the state, each representing 6,000 acres of surrounding forest. Each of the plots has four subplots that are 1/24 of an acre, each of those has a microplot of 1/300 of an acre, or a radius of 6.8 feet. Increasingly fine data are gathered as plot size decreases. On microplots, sapling and seedling trees are counted and cataloged.

Plots are important, said Laustsen, because no one can count all the trees on even an acre of land. It’s just impossible. So the sample plots stand in for the larger forests and forest types around them. It’s the same statistical strategy used in public opinion surveys: a portion of the population is polled, and the results are interpreted for the whole. Several hundred of the state’s forest plots go back to 1958, when it first started doing inventory surveys.

It takes five years to collect data from all 3,500 plots, Laustsen said. Seven two-person teams cover about 700 plots a year. It’s laborious, tedious work. When all those data are entered into the computer, though, it provides a snapshot in time of virtually any spot or area in the landscape. And because Laustsen always has five years of data to work with, it can provide a rolling view – sort of like a movie rather than a photo. It shows how tree composition is changing, which areas have been harvested and which trees taken, what insects and diseases are at work, and what areas have been turned into houses or roads.

“Probably the most fun thing to do is to look at the trees and see how the state of Maine has changed since 1958,” said Laustsen.

One way: there is slightly less forest. In 1958, the state was 90 percent forested. Since 2012, it has been 89 percent. In southern Maine, development has cut into the amount of forest, and the regrowth of abandoned farmland has ground to a halt. A related observation: Laustsen noted that Maine’s pure stands of white pine are no longer so plentiful, because the pines that filled abandoned fields in the last century have been harvested, or the land has reverted to other forest types or has been developed. Aspens and white birches are disappearing and being replaced by other longer-lived species. One trend that surprises Laustsen is the increasing prevalence of northern red oak, a species that “has been making substantial growth over the last 10 years.”

Tapping into his FIA treasure trove, Laustsen can not only tell you what things were like; he also can predict what they will become. Moreover, he can determine what things would be like, or might be like, in different scenarios. With a few clicks on his computer, Laustsen can move around data points to create hypothetical conditions. For instance, if he posits that some of the plots in northern Maine are going to be stripped of spruce and fir by spruce budworms, he can watch an epidemic, or versions of it, play out on his screen.

Of course, all this is predicated on data that represents what has already happened. And the future has a way of unfolding differently from what even futurists expect. As the investing disclaimer has it, “Past performance is not predictive of future results.” Laustsen knows this: “I have a catchphrase,” he said. “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Laustsen says teasing trends and forecasts out of the data isn’t really the hard part of his job as a biometrician. “The most challenging part is to be able to communicate what I find out to a client so they can use it effectively,” he said.

So who are Laustsen’s clients? Academics; his colleagues at the Maine Forest Service; federal, state, and local governments; reporters, too – Laustsen is my first stop when it comes to stats about Maine’s forest resources. Conservation and environmental groups come calling, as do industry groups. He gets queries from people interested in buying forestland in the state, from potential investors mulling over possible mill locations who want to know what the “wood basket” is in the area they’re considering, and from manufacturers who want to know whether there are enough trees to, say, add a third shift.

“Ken has often joked that I’m his best customer,” said Roberta Scruggs, the communications director of the Maine Forest Products Council. “He’s been an incredible help to me in my five years with the Council and, without complaint, has checked every figure in all our forest economy reports. In fact, I don’t use any figures about forestry without running them past him. I think he’s one of the most trusted people in our industry.”

Lloyd Irland, a forest economist and president of The Irland Group, a consulting firm based in Maine, is “a big Ken L. fan.” Forest resource assessment is a vital service, said Irland, who has testified in the state legislature against proposals to cut funding for it.

Maine has never needed Laustsen’s “expertise and experience more than it does now,” Irland said. “Finding someone who can learn their way into what he does is very important. With markets in disarray, the trade situation uncertain, and some areas, until recently, cutting at or above long-run sustainable yields, landowners, the public, and state government need to know the state of the forest and how it is changing.”

Beyond more standardized reports, Laustsen has produced original tools that others can use. Two examples: he developed a sampling scheme to assess whether liquidation harvesting had occurred on a parcel of land and a “stump cruise” protocol that allows foresters to accurately estimate the value of lost stumpage in timber trespass cases.

Plus, he does a lot of educational outreach – talking to school classes about Maine’s forests and how to measure what’s in them. He has worked with some 20 schools through Project Learning Tree to set up FIA-like test plots – they call them Forest Inventory Growth plots or FIGs – that can be monitored and measured by students, with the results shared online with other schools.

“We’re getting students to think about how a forest grows and changes – the basic forest dynamics,” Laustsen said. “To get them to look 50 years, 100 years, or 150 years in the future. To show them that their data down the line has utility.”

In that way, Laustsen might be helping create a future biometrician or two.

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