Dr. Birdsey received a Ph.D. degree in quantitative methods from the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He has a Master's Degree in World Forestry and a Bachelor's Degree in Anthropology.He spent 2 years as a Peace Corps Forester in Ecuador, 10 years as a Research Forester with the Forest Service in the Forest Inventory and Analysis Project at the Southern Research Station, and 3 years on the Forest Inventory and Analysis Staff in the Washington Office of the Forest Service. He has been Program Manager for Global Change Research for the last 10 years at the Northeastern and North Central Research Stations. Dr. Birdsey is a specialist in quantitative methods for large-scale forest inventories and has pioneered the development of methods to estimate national carbon budgets for forest lands from forest inventory data.