rFIA

The goal of 'rFIA' is to increase the accessibility and use of the United States Forest Services (USFS) Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Database by providing a user-friendly, open source toolkit to easily query and analyze FIA Data. Designed to accommodate a wide range of potential user objectives, 'rFIA' simplifies the estimation of forest variables from the FIA Database and allows all R users (experts and newcomers alike) to unlock the flexibility inherent to the Enhanced FIA design. Specifically, 'rFIA' improves accessibility to the spatial-temporal estimation capacity of the FIA Database by producing space-time indexed summaries of forest variables within user-defined population boundaries. Direct integration with other popular R packages (e.g., 'dplyr', 'tidyr', and 'sf') facilitates efficient space-time query and data summary, and supports common data representations and API design. The package implements design-based estimation procedures outlined by Bechtold & Patterson (2005) doi:10.2737/SRS-GTR-80, and has been validated against estimates and sampling errors produced by FIA 'EVALIDator'. Current development is focused on the implementation of spatially-enabled model-assisted estimators to improve population, change, and ratio estimates.