Maintaining a Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) site on 35 hectares (85 acres) in partnership with Smithsonian, Harvard Forest is one 75+ such sites globally that measures forest function and diversity to better understand the impacts of climate change, guide sustainable forest management & natural resource policies, and build capacity in forest science.
In 2014, Harvard Forest completed the initial mapping for this plot, lovingly referred to as our “megaplot,” where every woody stem over 1cm in diameter in the plot was GIS-mapped, tagged, and measured (over 116,000 stems in all!). In fact, Harvard Forest’s site was one of the first temperate sites to be added to the ForestGEO observatory, and remains the largest site of its kind in North America.
The primary phase of the second census of the trees and shrubs in the plot was completed in 2019, with the count of stems now over 122,000. The third census is now (as of 2025) underway.
If funding can be sustained, the plot will be remeasured every five years in perpetuity.
Many of the Forest’s longest-running research experiments are in the footprint of the ForestGEO plot. The closely monitored trees in the plot provide invaluable context for those investigations of carbon, water, and other ecosystem fundamentals, particularly as large swaths of the forest change due to the hemlock woolly adelgid.
Plot data is publicly available online and has been used for spatial analyses, remote sensing and Lidar studies, forest modelling studies, and in synthesis studies of large plots worldwide.
See Related Publications.