
Southern Forest Resource Assessment Consortium
Mission and Goals
The Southern Forest Resource Assessment Consortium (SOFAC) develops forest sector market models for application to forest resource assessments in the South, U.S., and the World. SOFAC modelers and members will be able to use the SOFAC suite of models and research to simultaneously project timber inventory, supply, and prices for a variety of regions and a variety of timber products across the South. SOFAC will continue cooperative university-industry-public agency cooperation in southern and national forest sector economic modeling, enhancing graduate instruction in forest economics and modeling.
Get the Latest News through our SOFAC Blog
- Febuary 22, 2023 – Demand growth and price responsiveness can influence inventory tipping points of high-grade white oak
- October 20, 2022 – Growing Stock vs. All-Live Inventory Data: Historical and Projected Trends
- July 22, 2022 – Changes in growing stock inventory data
- May 19, 2022 – TPO data: recent trends and county-level variation (white paper).
- November 8, 2021 – The relationship between mortgage rates and sawtimber prices.
- October 4, 2021 – An approach which can visualize the difference in market- and policy-driven changes in forest carbon sequestration over time.
2023 Annual Meeting
- The SOFAC 2023 annual meeting will be held on the Centennial Campus of NC State University on August 3 &4, 2023. Please save the date. Details will be coming later this spring.
2022 Annual Meeting
- The 2022 SOFAC annual meeting was held on August 9 & 10, 2022 in both in-person and Zoom formats. Click here for information about the meeting and a links to the speaker presentations.
Models
The core SOFAC modeling framework is the SubRegional Timber Supply (SRTS) Model, which is a bio-economic model that integrates forest inventory and analysis data and economic principles to estimate inventory, supply, demand, and price trends.
SOFAC integrates currently available forest resource data from the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program and economic theory to model timber supply, demand, and prices in the South by local area; analyze the status of southern timber supply periodically; and analyze the impacts of new market and policy factors on timber supply.
Models that are linked to SRTS include modules that periodically collect and update the USDA Forest Service FIA data. Further, SRTS is linked to other economic frameworks that provide important data elements, including projections of:
- Land use change,
- Pine plantation responses to price changes,
- Timber demand and removals, and
- Climate impacts on forest productivity.
This suite of models is then used to project timber supply at the regional to local level under a range of economic and policy scenarios in the South, with occasional applications in the Northeast and Midwest.
In addition to SRTS, SOFAC affiliates work with a wide range of economic modeling tools, ranging from spatially explicit frameworks to global models of forest product markets and land use. These models include:
- The Global Timber Model (GTM)
- The US Forest and Agricultural Sector Optimization Model (FASOM)
- The Land Use and Resource Allocation (LURA) Model
- The Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM)
SOFAC affiliates also perform timber investment and production economics studies are performed periodically with graduate students, including analysis of global timber investments, logging capacity, biomass harvesting contracts, and timber market structure.
Applications
SOFAC affiliates have completed recent studies on topics such as new forest products processing capacity or closures, growth and removal cycles, wood chip demand, bioenergy, wood pellets, and drivers of land use change. We are actively modeling the market and resource implications of using more roundwood for bioenergy (including the impact of state, federal, and EU policies); the effects of holding more sawtimber for longer periods; evaluating the effects of carbon policies on southern U.S. forests; and assessing the impacts of forest market structure on timberland investments.
Recent research efforts led by SOFAC faculty affiliates cover the following topics:
- Modeling southern forest futures
- Forest carbon management and policy analysis
- Forest bioenergy analysis and modeling
- Identifying hotspots for new forests and silvicultural investments
- Projecting global forest product trade flows
- Exploring interactions between forests and water resource management
- Modeling the potential implications of environmental change on forest management and markets.
People
Justin S. Baker, Director of SOFAC and Associate Professor of Forest Resource Economics
David Rossi, SOFAC Research Associate
Robert Abt, Principal SRTS Developer and Professor of Forest Economics
Kelley McCarter, SOFAC Meeting Coordinator
Graduate Students:
Gaurav Dhungel, NCSU FER
Madisen Fuller, NCSU FER
Olakunle Sodiya, NCSU FER