Management practices are one of the most important factors affecting forest structure and function. Landowners in southern United States manage forests using appropriately sized areas, to meet management objectives that include economic return, sustainability, and esthetic enjoyment. Road networks spatially designate the socio-environmental elements for the forests, which represented and aggregated as forest management units. Road networks are widely used for managing forests by setting logging roads and firebreaks. We propose that common types of forest management are practiced in road-delineated units that can be determined by remote sensing satellite imagery coupled with crowd-sourced road network datasets. Satellite sensors do not always capture road-caused canopy openings, so it is difficult to delineate ecologically relevant units based only on satellite data. By integrating citizen-based road networks with the National Land Cover Database, we mapped road-delineated management units across the regional landscape and analyzed the size frequency distribution of management units. We found the road-delineated units smaller than 0.5 ha comprised 64% of the number of units, but only 0.98% of the total forest area. We also applied a statistical similarity test (Warren’s Index) to access the equivalency of road-delineated units with forest disturbances by simulating a serious of neutral landscapes. The outputs showed that the whole southeastern U.S. has the probability of road-delineated unit of 0.44 and production forests overlapped significantly with disturbance areas with an average probability of 0.50.

中文翻译：

---

绘制区域森林经营单位的图：东南沿海平原和皮埃蒙特的公路框架

管理实践是影响森林结构和功能的最重要因素之一。美国南部的土地所有者使用适当大小的区域来管理森林，以实现包括经济回报，可持续性和审美享受在内的管理目标。道路网络在空间上指定了森林的社会环境要素，这些要素代表并汇总为森林管理单位。道路网络通过设置伐木道路和防火带而广泛用于森林管理。我们建议在可通过遥感卫星图像与人群来源的道路网络数据集相结合确定的道路划定的单位中实施常见的森林管理类型。卫星传感器并不总是能够捕捉道路引起的树冠开口，因此很难仅根据卫星数据来描述与生态相关的单位。通过将基于公民的道路网络与国家土地覆盖数据库相集成，我们在整个区域景观中绘制了道路划分的管理单位，并分析了管理单位的规模频率分布。我们发现，小于0.5公顷的道路划定单位占单位数量的64％，但仅占森林总面积的0.98％。我们还应用了统计相似性测试（沃伦指数），以通过模拟严重的中性景观来获取有森林干扰的道路划定单位的等效性。输出结果表明，整个美国东南部的道路划定单位概率为0.44，而生产林与扰动区明显重叠，平均概率为0.50。