Projecting Forest Ownership Changes in the Southern United States
Landownership patterns have changed over the past and will continue to change in the future. Given that ownership class is a proxy for a variety of behavioral norms associated with forest management and uses, projections of ownership change may provide useful information for forecasting changes in forest use and conditions. Our objective is to develop a model that can be used to predict ownership changes in response to several driving variables. We will use ownership category data measured at forest inventory plots to test hypotheses regarding the effects of driving variables on ownership and to build a model of ownership changes. A multinomial probability model will be used to describe the probability of observing a type of ownership for a plot as a function of the explanatory variables that describe the biophysical condition of the plot and the socioeconomic conditions of the county in which the plot resides.
