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National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS)

The USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program conducts the National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS) to quantify: 

  • Who owns the forests of the United States;
  • Why they own them;
  • How they use them; and 
  • What they intend to do with them.

The NWOS serves as the social complement to the Nationwide Forest Inventory (NFI) and the National Resource Use Monitoring (NRUM) surveys that the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program conducts. 

Of the 704 million acres of forest land in the United States, excluding interior Alaska, 60 percent is privately owned. These 420 million acres are owned by over 10 million corporations, families, individuals, and other private groups. If we want to fully understand the forests, we need to understand the people and groups that control it. Summary information from the NWOS is used by people who provide, design, and implement services, programs and policies that impact private forest owners, including government agencies, landowner organizations and other non-governmental organizations, private service providers, business analysts, forest industry companies, and academic researchers. 

The NWOS is implemented through the Family Forest Research Center, which is a joint venture between the USDA Forest Service and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

The NWOS collects information on forest characteristics, ownership objectives, ownership history, forest use, forest management, information sources, concerns, intentions, and demographics. Self-administered surveys are sent out to approximately 12,000 randomly selected private landowners each year, based on a systematic random sampling design.

Survey Protocol

  • Self-administered surveys are sent out to approximately 12,000 randomly selected private landowners each year, based on a systematic random sampling design. 

Data Collected

  • Forest characteristics
  • Ownership objectives
  • Ownership history 
  • Forest use
  • Forest management
  • Information sources
  • Concerns
  • Intentions
  • Demographics

What is the National Woodland Owner Survey? 

The USDA Forest Service's National Woodland Owner Survey is a survey of the individuals and private companies and organizations that own nearly two-thirds of the forest and woodland across the U.S. The purpose of this survey is to answer questions related to:

  • What types of people and organizations own America's forests and woodlands? 
  • Why do they own these lands? 
  • What have they done with these lands in the past?
  • What do they plan to do with these lands in the future? 

What is the history of the National Woodland Owner Survey? 

Surveys of private woodland owners began in earnest in United States following World War II. The first survey work was concentrated in New England and the Lake States, but soon spread to other parts of the U.S. The first national woodland owner survey was conducted in 1978 followed by iterations completed in 1994, 2006, and 2013, and 2018. 

How often is the National Woodland Owner Survey conducted? 

The National Woodland Owner Survey contacts landowners on annual basis with a full survey cycle completed every five years. Only a small subset of woodland owners are contacted and no owner will be contacted more than once during a state survey cycle. 

What types of questions are asked? 

The survey asks questions related to: 

  • The general characteristics of the landowner's woodland
  • Reasons for why they own woodland
  • How they use their woodland
  • If and how their woodland is managed
  • How landowners learn about their woodland
  • The landowner's concerns related to their woodland
  • Intended future uses of their land
  • General demographic information

How will the data collected be used? 

All information provided by respondents to the National Woodland Owner Survey is held in strict confidentiality. By law, no information is allowed to be released to anyone - be they another government agency or a private citizen - that can be used to identify an individual who provides information to the Survey. The information collected will only be used to produce statistical reports of general trends in landowner attributes. Groups that will use the results range from government agencies to local landowner organizations to forestry consultants to educators. Government agencies use the information collected by the National Woodland Owner Survey to design programs to assist landowners and to allocate funds once the programs are initiated. At more local levels, the information is used to understand the people that own the forest resources in an area so that local groups and service providers can better communicate and understand the views of the woodland owner community. 

Why are questions about demographics, such as age and race, asked? How are these data used? 

The demographic questions asked in this survey are used to help assess the state of the forests of our country. For example, one of the major issues facing private forests in this country is the aging of the forest landowners with nearly a third of the landowners being over 65 years old. As landowners age, the incentive for them to perform certain activities on their land, such as planting trees, changes and the probability that their land will be changing hands increases. In addition, this information is used to make sure that programs designed to help forest landowners are accessible to everyone. For example federal and state forest agencies will know if a segment of the forest landowner population, be they an age, economic, or a minority group, are not receiving forestry assistance and can then redesign their programs to over-come these shortcomings. 

How does this information help forest landowners? 

The National Woodland Owner Survey helps private woodland owners in a myriad of ways. On a broad scale, it helps create a dialogue between landowners and the rest of society. Although individual landowners and landowner organizations do communicate with the rest of society on a regular basis, having scientific information pertaining to this important and diverse group of people has proven to be a very effective communication tool. From a political perspective, this information helps politicians and government agencies quantify trends in woodland ownership and design programs that meet the needs of both the landowners and the broader needs of society. In particular, the information from this survey is used to allocate funding for various landowner assistance programs. The private sector also finds this information useful be they consulting foresters providing services to the landowners or large corporations that need to know what types of products they can expect to receive from private lands.

Key Personnel

NWOS Contact

Special Publications

Geospatial Products

  • Forest Ownership in the Conterminous United States, 2017: Geospatial Dataset

    This data publication contains raster data depicting the spatial distribution of forest ownership types in the conterminous United States circa 2009. The data are a modeled representation of forest land by ownership type, and include three types of public ownership: federal, state, and local, as well as three types of private: family (includes individuals and families), corporate, and other private (includes conservation and natural resource organizations, unincorporated partnerships and associations, and Native American tribal lands).

2018

Summaries related to the 2018 NWOS Data.

2013

Summaries and publications related to the 2013 NWOS data.

2006

1993

These publications are summaries from the 1993 base/rural NWOS data. 

1978

This summary documentation was conducted by the USDA Economic Research Service. 

Last updated February 24, 2024
https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/programs/fianwos