NSF Center for Advanced Forestry Systems.

A significant amount of forestry research has taken place in university-based, industry-supported, cooperative research programs. These discipline based “coops” have been extraordinarily successful at achieving research and technological advances that are relevant to the forest industry. However, many of the problems facing forestry today, and the largest opportunities for breakthrough advances, are in areas that bridge disciplinary boundaries. The National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center Program (I/UCRC) is designed to link academic scientists and industry partners with the NSF to address these complex problems facing all industries today.  We recently received support from the NSF I/UCRC program to form the NSF Center for Advanced Forestry Systems. This new center links four of the top forestry research programs in the United States: North Carolina State University (NCSU), Oregon State University (OSU), Purdue University (PU), and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI&SU). The new center expands on existing university-based industry-supported research programs at these four institutions to create a multi-university, truly interdisciplinary I/UCRC that is working to solve industry-wide problems through multi-faceted approaches. The Center for Advanced Forestry Systems builds on the strengths of the four institutions by bringing together scientists to conduct collaborative research that transcends traditional species and disciplinary boundaries. Scientists involved in the Center for Advanced Forestry Systems are approaching research questions on multiple scales from the gene to the landscape. Scientists with a wide range of expertise including molecular genetics cellular biology, tree breeding, clonal propagation, tree ecophysiology, soils, ecology, silviculture, growth modeling, remote sensing and spatial analysis are working collaboratively under  the Center for Advanced Forestry Systems umbrella to optimize genetic and cultural systems to produce high-quality, low-cost raw materials for new and existing forest products industries.