Treesearch is the site [1. U.S. Forest Service website] that provides easy access to a database of tens of thousands of Forest Service research papers, documents and projects from across a span of many decades.
The Forest Service itself is divided administratively into six Regions and corresponding Research Stations, each of which has historically addressed topics & issues that pertain to the different regions of the United States. One of the ways in which the Treesearch database is organized, in turn, is on the basis of these regions. So an interest in the forests and ecology of any given region of our continent can be persued, without having to paw through nonapplicable database results for the other regions.
On their About page the USFS says (2011):
Treesearch is an online system for locating and delivering publications by Research and Development scientists in the US Forest Service. Publications in the collection include research monographs published by the agency as well as papers written by our scientists but published by other organizations in their journals, conference proceedings, or books. Research results behind these publications have been peer reviewed to ensure the best quality science.
At the end of 2011, there are over 35,000 publications available.
At the end of 2014, the homepage is reporting 42,851 publications in the database.
Search results are present chronologically, from newest to oldest, in an HTML table (paginated). There are four columns in the table, for Year, Title, Author and Research Station. The Title is a link to a separate webpage, or cover sheet, for each listed document.
The individual publication-page then contains a link to the actual download file, typically in PDF format. The main attraction of the individual pub-page, though, is the excellent description-text that has been written for them.
An example individual publication page, for PRESTO: online calculation of carbon in harvested wood products, provides the following description:
Carbon stored in harvested wood products is recognized under international carbon accounting protocols, and some crediting systems may permit the inclusion of harvested wood products when calculating carbon sequestration. For managers and landowners, however, estimating carbon stored in harvested wood products may be difficult. PRESTO (PRoduct EStimation Tool Online) is a Web-based tool that enables users to easily estimate the carbon stored in harvested wood products and the changes in this quantity over time. The tool may be used in an exploratory mode to examine the impacts of changing the amounts of longer- and shorter-lived products, or with specific harvest data to produce stand-level reports. The methods used are consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Good Practice Guidance, as well as U.S. voluntary carbon accounting guidelines.
The author-field of the search-results, and each individual publication cover-page also contain a link to a page for the author, or one or more of a multi-author entry. These pages have links to other papers & projects of the author. Keywords are compiled for publications, and each of these is a link to database-results for other entries indexed under each keyword.
The author-page for author Coeli Hoover of the PRESTO carbon-calculator report, eg, contains a Featured Publications & Products sections, with half a dozen entries, all of them about carbon management, estimation and quantification, in relation to forests and forest products. Below the Featured section are dozens of Hoover’s other published works; all of them about carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes, models, climate change factors, indicator-species and other focused topics.
Treesearch is a valuable and very easy-to-use resource. There is an excellent set of Help pages.