Support Activities for Forestry (NAICS 115310): An Investor's Primer

1. Overview

Support Activities for Forestry is the "hands and services" layer of the American forest economy. These are the specialist firms and crews that do the work around growing and harvesting trees, without owning the timberland or running the sawmill themselves: they plant seedlings after a harvest or a fire, cruise (measure and value) standing timber, write forest management plans, thin and spray young stands, control pests, and fight and prevent forest fires — including dropping retardant from aircraft.[1][2]

Why an investor should care: this is a small, fragmented, mostly private, and highly seasonal service industry that sits on top of two very large money flows — the roughly $3 billion a year the U.S. government spends fighting wildfires, and the multi-decade capital cycle of planting and tending commercial timber.[3][4] It is labor-heavy, cyclical, and quietly essential — guest workers hired through these contractors plant an estimated 85% of the trees replanted on U.S. forestland after logging or disturbance.[5]

Ways in differ sharply by investor type. Public-market investors will find almost no pure play: the industry is overwhelmingly small private contractors and sole proprietors, with one notable listed company in the fire-safety niche (Perimeter Solutions), one in aerial firefighting (Bridger Aerospace), and the big timberland REITs (real estate investment trusts) serving only as an indirect, demand-side proxy. Private investors and operators — the natural owners here — participate directly by owning or rolling up forestry-services, reforestation, or wildland-fire contracting businesses, most of which fall under the U.S. Small Business Administration's small-business ceiling.

2. What it is and how it's structured

The U.S. Census Bureau defines NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 115310 as establishments performing support activities related to timber production, wood technology, forestry economics and marketing, and forest protection.[1][2] In plain terms, the work splits into a few buckets:

• Reforestation and stand tending — tree planting, aerial and ground seeding, site preparation, thinning, brush clearing, and herbicide application on young stands.[2][5]
• Forest measurement and consulting — timber cruising and estimating, timber valuation, forest inventory, and writing forest management plans; increasingly, carbon-inventory work for landowners entering carbon-credit markets.[2][6]
• Forest protection — forest firefighting and fire prevention, aerial retardant application, and forest pest and disease control.[1][2]

What it excludes (this matters for reading any data on the industry):

• Growing the seedlings is a different code — 113210, Forest Nurseries and Gathering of Forest Products.[2]
• Owning timberland to sell standing timber is 113110, Timber Tract Operations; the big timberland REITs sit here, not in 115310.[7]
• Cutting the trees — the actual harvest — is 113310, Logging.[8]
• Government forest and conservation administration — the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and state forestry agencies managing public land — is Public Administration (924120), not this industry.[2]

That last exclusion is the single most important thing to understand about the sector: a very large share of America's forest-support work is done in-house by government agencies and by timberland owners' own staff, and never shows up in the private 115310 statistics at all.

Ownership mix: predominantly small, private, owner-operated businesses and seasonal labor crews. The largest forest-management and consulting firms — American Forest Management (managing more than 5.7 million acres with over 370 employees and exclusive contractors) and F&W Forestry among them — are privately held.[9] A handful of specialized fire and reforestation contractors have scaled, and a few input suppliers and aerial operators are publicly listed, but there is no large corporate roll-up that defines the space.

3. How big it is

Per the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (2023 — employer businesses only):[10]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' industry-productivity series, which includes wage and salary workers, unincorporated self-employed workers, and unpaid family workers, reports broader employment: 24,200 jobs in 2023, 25,500 in 2024, and 26,700 in 2025.[11] These figures should not be divided by the CBP establishment count to infer average firm size, as they represent a broader employment concept.

The SBA sets the small-business size standard for this industry at $11.5 million in average annual receipts — i.e., essentially every firm in it is a small business by federal definition.[12] A private-sector industry-revenue estimate from IBISWorld puts "Forest Support Services" at roughly $3.5 billion in 2024.[4]

The industry can be locally significant. Oregon reported 6,024 covered jobs in support activities for forestry in 2024 and an average annual wage of $75,884, with employment described as highly seasonal — beginning with planting in late winter and spring and moving into firefighting during summer.[13]

The undercount — read this before trusting any single number. The federal employer statistics materially understate true activity, for four reasons:

1. Government does much of the work itself. Federal and state agencies employ tens of thousands of wildland firefighters, foresters, and reforestation crews. That labor is classified as public administration (924120), not 115310, so the private-industry figures capture only the outsourced slice.[2][3]
2. Seasonality hides the peak. The 15,361 employee count is a mid-March snapshot — the off-season. First-quarter payroll was only about 19% of the full-year total, evidence that headcount and pay swell during the spring planting and summer fire seasons and shrink in winter.[10]
3. Tiny and self-employed operators. Consulting foresters and one-person crews often file as nonemployer businesses, outside the employer counts above.
4. Guest-worker labor churns. Much reforestation is done by seasonal H-2B guest workers hired through contractors; their numbers ebb and flow with the season and with visa availability rather than appearing as steady payroll.[5]

Bottom line: treat 115310's ~$1 billion payroll and ~15,000 employees as the private, outsourced, employer core of a much larger forest-support effort whose full scale — counting government crews and seasonal labor — is several times that.

4. The investable universe

There is no clean public "forestry services" stock. The listed exposures fall into three tiers, from most-direct to demand-proxy.

Private and other owners (where the industry actually lives):

• Forest management and consulting: American Forest Management, F&W Forestry Services, LandVest, Mason, Bruce & Girard, and many regional consulting foresters.[9]
• Timberland investment management organizations (TIMOs) that hire these services on behalf of institutions: Manulife Investment Management (formerly Hancock Natural Resource Group), Campbell Global (owned by BlackRock), and peers.[18]
• Wildland-fire and reforestation contractors: several hundred private firms — Grayback Forestry, Patrick Environmental, and others — represented in part by the National Wildfire Suppression Association (300-plus contractors, ~10,000 firefighters). In aerial fire, private operators include Coulson Aviation, Neptune Aviation, and Conair/Aero-Flite.[19][20]

For a public-market investor, the honest summary: PRM and BAER are the only listed names whose fortunes rise and fall with forest-support activity itself — PRM is a fire-safety chemicals company and BAER is an aerial firefighting operator, neither a diversified forestry-services firm. Bridger's economics illustrate the niche's volatility: its 2025 results showed $51.7 million gross income and $4.1 million net income on $122.8 million revenue, with revenue concentrated in the fire season and among a handful of government customers.[15] Everything else is either an input supplier or a landowner. Direct ownership of the industry is a private-market game.

5. How the money works

Owners in this industry make money by selling time, crews, and materials against forest work — and the economics look like contracting and professional services, not like manufacturing or real estate. The revenue models vary by segment:

• Reforestation and stand work — priced per acre. A contractor bids to plant, spray, or thin at a per-acre rate. In the U.S. South, hand-planting bareroot pine has run on the order of $50 per acre for the planting labor alone, with total stand establishment (site prep, seedlings, and planting) ranging from under $100 to over $450 per acre depending on intensity.[21] Margins are thin; the crew is the cost.
• Consulting and cruising — fee-for-service or a share of timber value. Foresters bill for inventory, management plans, and timber-sale administration, sometimes as a percentage of the timber's sale value. This is a billable-utilization business: the key metric is how many days the foresters and crews are actually working and getting paid.
• Fire suppression — day rates, standby, and mobilization. Contract engines, crews, and aircraft earn a daily availability rate plus a higher "working" rate when deployed. It is a feast-or-famine model tied to fire-season severity — quiet years leave equipment idle, bad years are extremely busy.[19]
• Aerial firefighting — high fixed costs, utilization-dependent. Aircraft ownership or leases, engine and airframe overhauls, specialized pilots, maintenance technicians, hangars, insurance, fuel, and debt service create high fixed costs. Profitability depends on winning availability contracts, securing sufficient flight hours, and spreading fixed costs over a productive fire season.[15]
• Retardant and materials — per gallon and per base. Perimeter's model is partly product (retardant sold by volume) and partly service (fully staffing and running airbases under contract).[14]

The cost structure is dominated by labor — largely seasonal, and in reforestation largely H-2B guest workers — plus fuel, equipment, insurance, and the performance bonds that government contracts require.[5][19] Fixed assets are light for a planting crew but heavy for an aviation operator. Because the work is weather- and season-dependent, utilization (billable days per crew or aircraft) and season length are the profit levers, and working capital is strained by slow-paying government contracts and by paying crews before the client pays the contractor. This is a low-margin, high-variability business where scale, safety record, bonding capacity, and reliable access to labor separate the survivors.

6. What drives demand

• Timber harvest levels. Every acre logged typically must be replanted, and harvest volumes track lumber prices, pulp and paper demand, and ultimately U.S. housing starts. USDA describes residential construction as a key driver of wood-products demand; higher housing and remodeling activity supports lumber consumption, timber harvest, and eventually reforestation and inventory work. Weyerhaeuser similarly identifies U.S. housing, repair and remodeling, interest rates, inflation, exports, and trade policy as major determinants.[7][22][23]
• Reforestation mandates and public funding. The 2021 REPLANT Act (Repairing Existing Public Land by Adding Necessary Trees) removed the $30-million annual cap on the federal Reforestation Trust Fund; USDA budget materials indicate this could make $300 million or more annually available. The Forest Service faces a backlog of more than 4 million acres — more than half arising from high-severity fire during 2020 and 2021 — and completed more than 231,000 acres of reforestation in fiscal 2024.[24][25][26]
• Wildfire severity and firefighting budgets. Federal suppression has averaged roughly $3 billion a year over the past decade (about $3.2 billion in 2023), and in some years private contractors have supplied more than 40% of the Forest Service's suppression effort.[3][19] Forest Service research finds that average annual acreage burned by large wildfires since 2000 is more than twice the pre-2000 average; a separate study found that annual forest area burned increased tenfold and high-severity area fifteenfold between 1985 and 2022.[27][28]
• Prescribed fire expansion. Prescribed fire and mechanical fuel treatment should expand to reduce wildfire risk, though smoke rules, liability, weather windows, and trained-personnel shortages constrain deployment. Prescribed fire already accounts for more than half of annually burned area in the United States.[29]
• Forest health shocks. Bark-beetle outbreaks, invasive pests, and disease drive pest-control and salvage-and-replant work.
• Carbon markets. Growing interest in forest carbon credits is creating new demand for the measurement, inventory, and third-party verification that consulting foresters provide — essentially a timber cruise repurposed to count carbon.[6]
• Landowner turnover. As timberland changes hands among TIMOs, REITs, and family owners, new owners hire out management, inventory, and stand-improvement work.[18]

7. Regulation

• Immigration / H-2B visas. This is the industry's defining regulatory dependency. Seasonal reforestation labor runs largely on the H-2B temporary non-agricultural guest-worker program, which carries a statutory annual cap of 66,000 (often supplemented — an extra ~64,700 was released for fiscal 2026). The cap has been hit every year since 2014, so visa availability directly limits how many trees contractors can plant.[5][30] The U.S. Department of Labor applies specific guidance and mandated wage rates to tree-planting and reforestation jobs.[31]
• Labor and wage law. Reforestation workers are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA); the sector has a history of DOL enforcement. The Department of Labor applies migrant-worker, minimum-wage, prevailing-wage, transportation, housing, safety, and disclosure rules to manual reforestation work.[31][32]
• Worker safety. Chainsaw work, herbicide handling, and wildland firefighting make this a hazardous industry under Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rules.
• Environmental regulation. Standard-practice silvicultural runoff from reforestation, thinning, prescribed burning, pest control, and road work is generally exempt from Clean Water Act Section 402 permitting, but Section 404 wetlands requirements, existing discharge permits, and other federal and state laws still apply.[33][34] Federal work may require NEPA, Endangered Species Act, and historic-preservation review. Prescribed burning must fit burn plans and smoke-management requirements, while escaped-fire liability can be severe.[35]
• State forest-practice acts. States such as Oregon, Washington, and California mandate reforestation after harvest and regulate practices — effectively creating guaranteed demand for planting and management services.
• Contracting and aviation standards. Federal fire and forestry contracts require crews and aircraft to meet incident-qualification ("carding") standards, and aerial operators answer to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Pesticide application for pest control requires EPA/state licensing.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The industry is highly fragmented and localized, with average firms of roughly eight employees.[10] Barriers to entry are low for a labor crew — a truck, tools, and a bonded contract — which keeps competition intense and margins thin at the planting-and-thinning end. Barriers rise steeply for capital- and certification-heavy niches: aerial firefighting, retardant supply, and large-fleet suppression.

Consolidation is therefore uneven. It is most advanced where scale and certification matter most: fire retardant is effectively a single-supplier market (Perimeter Solutions), and the forestry-consulting tier has seen roll-ups, with American Forest Management sitting atop the management-and-consulting rankings.[9][14] The labor-crew and small-consulting tiers remain a long tail of independents.

A structural quirk worth noting: government is simultaneously the biggest customer and a direct competitor, because agencies run their own crews and can insource or outsource work depending on budgets and politics.[3] Large timber owners often internalize planning and procurement while outsourcing field execution, making them customers and competitors to independent service providers at the same time. That, plus dependence on annual appropriations and visa policy, caps how large and stable any private operator can get.

9. Risks

• Labor supply and immigration policy. Any tightening of H-2B caps, wage rules, or enforcement — or simply failing to secure enough visas — directly constrains revenue. The industry also carries reputational and legal risk from past guest-worker abuses (a 2012 judgment exceeded $11.8 million against forestry contractors for wage theft).[5][36]
• Feast-or-famine seasonality. Revenue swings with fire-season severity and weather; a mild fire year or a wet planting window can leave crews and aircraft idle. Bridger Aerospace reports that a significant share of revenue historically arrives in Q2 and Q3 during the North American fire season.[15][19]
• Commodity and housing cyclicality. Harvest-linked work rises and falls with lumber and pulp markets and homebuilding.[7][22]
• Government-budget and contract concentration. Heavy reliance on federal and state appropriations and on a small number of large contracts makes cash flow vulnerable to shutdowns, budget cuts, and re-competes. Bridger's three largest customers supplied 87% of its 2025 revenue, illustrating the bargaining power and budget risk government customers can impose.[15]
• Federal-project execution bottlenecks. GAO found that Forest Service timber-sale work is constrained by shortages of timber markers, silviculturists, engineers, contracting officers, biologists, and other review staff. The agency's workforce fell about 20% during fiscal 2025, and GAO documented some forest-program vacancy rates above 40%. Fewer government employees can create outsourcing opportunities but can also prevent projects from being surveyed, approved, and put out for bid.[37]
• Seed and nursery capacity constraints. The Forest Service operates six nurseries and two seed extractories, and its reforestation strategy acknowledges that seedling production must increase materially to meet restoration needs. Severe burns can eliminate local seed sources, and drought can make formerly suitable species or planting prescriptions unviable.[26]
• Safety and liability. Fatalities and serious injuries are a real risk in fire and chainsaw work, with insurance and bonding costs to match.
• Climate change — double-edged. More fire and disturbance means more suppression and replanting demand, but drought, heat, and poor seedling survival also raise costs and can undermine the work itself. Larger severe-burn scars increasingly fail to regenerate naturally, raising the need for active reforestation.[38]
• Thin margins and working capital. Low fixed costs at the crew level mean easy entry and persistent price competition; slow government payment strains cash.

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public-market routes. Choices are limited and none is a clean bet on forestry services:

• The closest listed operators are Perimeter Solutions (NYSE: PRM) — a fire-safety chemicals and services company whose retardant franchise and airbase operations tie directly to wildfire spending — and Bridger Aerospace (NASDAQ: BAER), an aerial firefighting operator with extreme seasonality and government-customer concentration. Both are concentrated, single-niche bets, not diversified forestry plays.[14][15]
• Demand proxies are the timberland REITs — Weyerhaeuser (WY) and Rayonier (RYN) — which are exposed to the same harvest-and-replant cycle but earn their money from land and timber, not services; they pay REIT dividends and trade on timberland values and lumber prices.[7][16][17] Equipment makers (Deere, Caterpillar) offer an even more diluted read on forest activity.

Private-market routes are where the industry is genuinely owned: buying or building reforestation, forest-management/consulting, or wildland-fire contracting businesses — most of which fall under the SBA's $11.5-million small-business ceiling — or investing in timberland through TIMOs and funds that then hire these services.[12][18] Attractive consolidation targets are likely to have recurring acres under management, diversified private and government customers, scarce professional credentials, reliable seasonal-labor access, and the ability to cross-sell timber sales, appraisal, certification, carbon measurement, and real-estate services. Direct ownership is operationally demanding (labor, safety, bonding, seasonality) but faces little large-corporate competition.

Technology's effect. Drones, lidar, satellite imagery, and photogrammetry can reduce field time and improve inventory, fire mapping, and treatment monitoring. Forest Service trials found drone- and airborne-laser tree counts closely aligned and described UAS inventory as rapid and replicable. The likely result is substitution away from some manual cruising and toward geospatial analysis, data management, and verification, while field sampling, marking, and treatment remain necessary.[39][40]

Near-term drivers to watch (forward-looking). Several tailwinds point up: the REPLANT Act's uncapped funding and the multi-million-acre reforestation backlog should sustain planting demand for years; wildfire severity trends keep suppression budgets elevated; and forest carbon markets are opening a new consulting revenue line.[6][24][25][26] The principal swing factors are less encouraging to count on: H-2B visa availability and immigration politics, federal appropriations, and the weather- and commodity-driven volatility that makes any single year hard to predict. The likely shape is a structurally growing but perennially cyclical and labor-constrained industry — one where disciplined private operators with reliable crews and clean safety and compliance records are best positioned, and where public-market investors are largely limited to indirect exposure.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Definition — 115310 Support Activities for Forestry," 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/
2. NAICS Association, "NAICS Code 115310 — Support Activities for Forestry" (definition, illustrative activities, cross-references), 2024. https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?code=115310
3. U.S. Forest Service Research & Development / National Interagency Fire Center, "Government spending on wildfire suppression," 2024. https://research.fs.usda.gov/srs/articles/government-spending-wildfire-suppression-rises-climate-change
4. IBISWorld, "Forest Support Services in the US — Market Size," 2024. https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/forest-support-services-united-states/
5. Journal of Forestry (Oxford Academic), "H-2B Guest Workers and the Critical Role They Play in US Forests," 2021. https://academic.oup.com/jof/article-abstract/119/5/467/6255284
6. Penn State Extension / Washington Forest Protection Association, "Forest Carbon Market Structures and Mechanisms" and "Navigating Forest Carbon Markets," 2024. https://extension.psu.edu/forest-carbon-market-structures-and-mechanisms
7. The Motley Fool, "Best Timberland REITs and How to Invest," 2026. https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/real-estate-investing/reit/timberland-reit/
8. IBISWorld, "NAICS Code 113310 — Logging," 2024. https://www.ibisworld.com/classifications/naics/113310/logging/
9. American Forest Management, corporate site, 2025. https://www.americanforestmanagement.com/about-us
10. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 115310 (establishments, employment, annual and first-quarter payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
11. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Industry Productivity Series via FRED, NAICS 115310 employment, 2025. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUAN115310W200000000
12. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards," 2023 (NAICS 115310: $11.5 million). https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
13. Oregon Employment Department, "Oregon's Forestry and Logging Industry: From Planting to Harvest," 2024. https://qualityinfo.org/-/oregon-s-forestry-and-logging-industry-from-planting-to-harvest-1
14. ExecutiveBiz / Perimeter Solutions (NYSE: PRM), "USDA Awards $1.12B Retardant Contract to Perimeter Solutions," 2024. https://www.executivebiz.com/articles/usda-perimeter-solutions-fire-retardant-contract-award
15. Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings (NASDAQ: BAER), Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1941536/000194153626000005/baer-20251231.htm
16. Rayonier Inc., Form 8-K announcing PotlatchDeltic merger completion, January 30, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/52827/000119312526032194/d63429d8k.htm
17. Rayonier Inc., Form 10-Q for first quarter 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1806931/000005282726000078/ryn-20260331.htm
18. Forisk Consulting, "North America's Top Timberland Owners and Managers, 2025 Update," 2025. https://forisk.com/north-americas-top-timberland-owners-and-managers-2025-update/
19. National Wildfire Suppression Association / FireRescue1, "Private firefighters join the fight," 2024. https://nwsa.us/; https://www.firerescue1.com/wildfire-and-wildland-urban-interface/as-wildfires-rage-private-firefighters-join-the-fight-for-the-fortunate-few
20. U.S. Forest Service, Aerial Firefighting Use and Effectiveness report, 2020. https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2020-08/08192020_afue_final_report_0.pdf
21. Alabama Cooperative Extension System, "Costs & Trends of Southern Forestry Practices, 2022," 2023. https://www.aces.edu/blog/topics/forestry/costs-trends-of-southern-forestry-practices-2022/
22. U.S. Department of Agriculture, "Projecting Lumber Demand in the US and Abroad," 2024. https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/projecting-lumber-demand-us-and-abroad
23. Weyerhaeuser Company, Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/106535/000119312526051422/wy-20251231.htm
24. American Forests, "The REPLANT Act," and Sen. Rob Portman, "REPLANT Act Signed into Law," 2021. https://www.americanforests.org/our-programs/policy/replant-act/
25. U.S. Department of Agriculture, "Celebrating Three Years of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law at USDA" (231,000 acres reforested in FY2024; ~4-million-acre backlog), 2024. https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2024/11/15/fact-sheet-celebrating-three-years-bipartisan-infrastructure-law-usda
26. U.S. Forest Service, Reforestation Program and National Reforestation Strategy. https://www.fs.usda.gov/forestmanagement/vegetation-management/reforestation/index.shtml
27. U.S. Forest Service, Resources Planning Act Assessment, wildfire trends. https://research.fs.usda.gov/srs/projects/rpa
28. U.S. Forest Service Research, "High-severity fire area increased tenfold, 1985–2022." https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/69806
29. U.S. Forest Service Research, "Prescribed fire accounts for more than half of annually burned area." https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/68408
30. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, "Cap Count for H-2B Nonimmigrants," and Federal Register, "FY2026 H-2B Supplemental Increase," 2026. https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-2b-non-agricultural-workers/cap-count-for-h-2b-nonimmigrants
31. U.S. Department of Labor, Training and Employment Guidance Letter No. 27-06, H-2B forestry guidance. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/advisories/training-and-employment-guidance-letter-no-27-06
32. U.S. Department of Labor, "Reforestation Worker Rights" (FLSA/MSPA fact sheet). https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/63-reforestation
33. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Clean Water Act Section 402 — NPDES" (silvicultural exemption). https://www.epa.gov/cwa-404/clean-water-act-section-402-national-pollutant-discharge-elimination-system
34. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Exemptions to Permit Requirements Under CWA Section 404." https://www.epa.gov/cwa-404/exemptions-permit-requirements-under-cwa-section-404
35. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Agriculture and Air Quality" (prescribed-fire smoke guidance). https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/agriculture-and-air-quality
36. High Country News / Southern Poverty Law Center, "The changing politics of woods work" (forestry contractor wage litigation), 2017. https://www.hcn.org/issues/49-18/timber-how-the-outsourcing-of-forestry-jobs-seeps-into-our-public-lands-debates/
37. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Forest Management workforce and capacity review, GAO-26-107993, 2026. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-107993
38. U.S. Forest Service Research, "Post-fire reforestation and natural regeneration failure." https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/67973
39. U.S. Forest Service Research, "UAS inventory trials — drone and airborne-laser tree counts." https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/58969
40. U.S. Forest Service, Cloud2Trees project (lidar and photogrammetry for forest inventory). https://research.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/projects/cloud2trees