Forest Conditions
Forest Conditions
Forest types across Colorado are diverse, ranging from piñon-juniper forests at lower elevations, to riparian woodlands, to spruce-fir forests at the highest elevations. The conditions of Colorado’s varied forest ecosystems face many challenges: an increase in insect activity and its effects on forests, lengthening wildfire seasons, a lack of seedling regeneration, reduced soil moisture along with warmer temperatures, and a loss of forests due to development and disturbance.
To meet these challenges and more, the Colorado State Forest Service and partners survey and monitor Colorado’s forests. These efforts ensure that treatments are effective and priority areas are mapped relative to insect outbreaks. In addition, the CSFS and partners implement forest treatments that ensure forests endure into the future, while reducing threats from insects and maintaining the many benefits that Colorado’s forests provide.
Goals and Accomplishments
Select locations on the map to learn about accomplishments toward goals for Forest Conditions.
Select a goal to learn about accomplishments toward that goal for Forest Conditions.
Goals and accomplishments are connected to national priorities of state forest action plans: Conserve working forestland, Protect forests from harm and Enhance public benefits from trees and forests
Goal 1: Keep Forests as Forests
- The CSFS and partners implement proactive forest management treatments to sustain forest health, improve resilience to wildfire and maintain working forest landscapes. Every year, they treat tens of thousands of acres of forestlands across Colorado using a variety of management approaches tailored to local conditions. In 2025, the CSFS launched a new Forests in Focus series to highlight examples of forest treatments across the state.
- Partners in forestry and ecology developed new tools to enhance accountability, tracking and coordination of forest treatments across jurisdictions in Colorado. In 2025, the CSFS and the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute launched the Colorado Forest Tracker, which provides a comprehensive view of treatments by federal, state, local and nonprofit partners. In addition, the Southwest Ecological Restoration Institutes created the Treatment and Wildfire Interagency Geodatabase, which captures treatments by federal agencies. These new tools foster enhanced transparency and communication, as well as more resilient forests and stronger cross-jurisdictional partnerships.
- Since the 1950s in Colorado, the annual aerial forest health survey has been a crucial strategy for monitoring forest conditions and informing management actions. From 2020 to 2024, the USDA Forest Service and CSFS surveyed a total of 135,129,780 acres of forests from the air to inspect and record the damage from insects and diseases. Although the COVID-19 pandemic presented significant logistical challenges in 2020 and 2021, aerial observers successfully prioritized and completed forest health surveys of critical areas without major illness or substantial delays. The comprehensive results from aerial forest health surveys are available in the ArcGIS Storymap Collection.
- Partners across diverse disciplines in Colorado developed two complementary resources to strengthen forest conditions and ensure forests remain as forests. The Colorado Wildfire Planning and Recovery Playbook provides counties, tribes, municipalities and water providers with 11 actionable steps to take before, during and immediately after a wildfire to facilitate recovery. Additionally, the Colorado Forest Resilience Planning Guide offers government agencies, private landowners and place-based partnerships a framework to align community values, technical expertise and financial resources in shaping forest management strategies. Together, these tools help to ensure that Colorado’s forests are managed with resilience, continuity and long-term sustainability in mind.
- The Forest Inventory and Analysis program, administered in Colorado by the CSFS in partnership with the USDA Forest Service, provides objective, scientifically credible data on forest extent, condition, volume, growth, depletion and health to track long-term changes in forest conditions across the state. From 2020 to 2024, FIA crews visited 2,189 plots across all land ownerships using a probabilistic, plot-based sampling design (~1 plot/6,000 acres). In Colorado, FIA crews with the CSFS remeasure approximately 4,500 plots over a 10-year cycle, delivering consistent, reliable, unbiased data about changing forest conditions to researchers, policymakers, landowners and resource professionals.
Goal 2: Improve Forest Productivity
- With more than $15 million in combined investments from the State of Colorado and the USDA Forest Service, the CSFS is completing a major renovation and modernization of the CSFS Nursery in Fort Collins. This much-needed renovation will expand production to 1-2 million container seedlings annually and modernize infrastructure, such as seed storage, seedling processing, bare-root fields and shade houses. The resulting facility will provide low-cost, locally adapted seedlings to federal, state and local partners, as well as private landowners, to support reforestation, recovery and long-term forest resilience.
- The CSFS supports both the science and management of project sites for the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change network. The ASCC network tests strategies at sites in the U.S. and Canada to better understand forest productivity following treatments under shifting climatic conditions. Treatments at ASCC sites are implemented in a replicated design, with managers and academics collaborating to tailor strategies to specific forest types and assess outcomes. The CSFS has established an ASCC experimental site at the Colorado State Forest to test and monitor treatments that increase the health and adaptive capacity of high‑elevation spruce‑fir forests in the face of changing climatic conditions. Additional sites in Colorado are planned for the Taylor Park and San Juan areas.
- The CSFS implements Western Bark Beetle silvicultural treatments to improve stand conditions and resilience in priority areas identified in the 2020 Colorado Forest Action Plan. Treatments that improve forest productivity include bark beetle sanitation and the prevention of infested trees, as well as thinning dense stands to enhance the vigor of trees and reduce susceptibility to insect attacks. Target species for treatments include spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis), Douglas-fir beetle (D. pseudotsugae), mountain pine beetle (D. ponderosae), roundheaded pine beetle (D. adjunctus), Southwestern pine beetle (D. approximatus) and Ips engraver beetles (Ips spp.). From 2020 to 2025, the CSFS completed 75 projects that treated 665.2 acres through the Western Bark Beetle initiative for both the prevention and direct suppression of bark beetles.
Goal 3: Promote Adaptive Management
- In 2022, the CSFS established an official Forest Monitoring program to inform adaptive management of forest treatments. Under the program, CSFS staff conduct pre- and post-treatment inventories to evaluate whether forestry projects meet stated objectives and provide feedback to partners to strengthen management approaches. Prior to 2022, the CSFS monitored 398 acres of treatments funded through the CSFS-administered Forest Restoration & Wildfire Risk Mitigation program. After 2022, the CSFS now monitors 3,829 acres of FRWRM treatments and 800 acres of treatments under CSFS-administered Healthy Forests & Vibrant Communities funding.
- Under direction from Colorado House Bill 22-1012, the CSFS developed and released the Colorado Forest Carbon Accounting Framework in 2024. Created using Forest Inventory and Analysis data, the framework tracks carbon stocks and flux across pools statewide over the past 20 years, providing insight into long-term changes in forest carbon storage and emissions. Colorado’s framework was developed based on a similar framework created by CalFire and the Pacific Northwest Research Station and in collaboration with Colorado State University’s Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory. It is repeatable and replicable over time and can be used to inform statewide policymaking and regional forest management planning.
- Over the past few years, the CSFS expanded the use of drones in forest management in partnership with the USDA Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. Drones provide efficient stand structure assessments in dry-mixed conifer forests and enable 3D visualizations of forest conditions before and after treatments, improving communication with landowners and informing adaptive management. This work enhances CSFS capacity for science-based management and strengthens partnerships with RMRS.
Impacts from BIL Forest Action Plan Funding
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Forest Action Plan implementation funding enables the Colorado State Forest Service to study and improve forest conditions through forest health initiatives. The CSFS Forest Health Team gathers data on the life histories of bark beetles that can degrade forest conditions. From 2023 to 2025, the team deployed 237 traps for eight significant bark beetle species that occur in Colorado. Forest health staff collected insects captured in the traps biweekly from April through October, then sorted and identified the species. With the data, the CSFS better understands when bark beetles are attacking trees to inform when to conduct forest management activities and reduce residual tree mortality.
In addition, BIL funding supports the CSFS Forest Health Team with helping landowners protect trees from bark beetle attacks through semiochemical packets. From 2020 to 2025, the team distributed or deployed 209,290 packets of product for landowners to hang on trees in Colorado. From 2023 to 2025, the team assisted 1,656 landowners in treating 29,093 acres to reduce bark beetle impacts. Applied annually, these chemical packets deter bark beetles from attacking trees by emitting pheromones that communicate to the beetles that the tree is already infested, so the beetles move on rather than attack the tree. The Forest Health Team targets Douglas-fir beetle, mountain pine beetle and spruce beetle through the use of these chemical packets.