Part B, Working Papers, February 1974 - Special Collections - US ...

in Vietnam and tree stem data obtained from sawmills and log assembly pointsin Military Region 3 were used to provide reasonable assurance that the groundtruth data were appropriate and applicable.The original objective of the Inland Forest Study Team was to assess theimpact of herbicide treatment on the inland forests in terms of damage tomerchantable timber. Botanists and ecolegists on the NAS committee were concernedwith the damage to the forests in strictly biological terms. They haveaddressed this subject in other papers prepared by the committee. It developed,however, that only the mangrove forests were sufficiently accessible to permitgeneral ecological studies. Since the inland forests comprised the major areaimpacted by the herbicides and were the target for most of the herbicide thatwas sprayed, the National Academy of Science felt that some quantitativeassessment of impact beyond the merchantable component of the forest ought tobe made. Accordingly, late in the course of the study, the forestry team wasasked to extend its investigations to cover damage to trees including thenon-merchantable components of the forest. The same limitations on accessthat inhibited the biologists also presented problems for the forestry team.Nonetheless, an effort was made to cover this additional area of inquiry.Damage to forests can take a variety of forms: a) loss of mature timber,b) loss of growing stock, c) loss of growth, and d) loss of seed source.Given the limitations of time and accessibility, these various forms of losswere susceptible to different levels of precision in estimation. The basictools of the forestry team were a variety of kinds of aerial photographiccoverage. Information obtained from these aerial photographs was augmentedby ground data for comparable forests in other areas of the region where theforests were accessible. These included forest inventories developed by FAO1-6