Dr. Harry T. Valentine

Harry T. Valentine of Madbury, New Hampshire, a research forester with the USDA Forest Service's Northeastern Research Station in Durham, will receive the Society of American Foresters' Award in Forest Science.The award recognizes distinguished individual research in any branch of the quantitative, managerial, or social sciences leading to the advancement of forestry.

A research forester with the USDA Forest Service for the past 30 years, Valentine is credited with making significant contributions to the forestry in a variety of subject areas, including insect modeling, forest inventory, forest growth modeling, and importance sampling.

"Dr. Valentine has made significant contributions in several disparate venues," says Ann Camp, chair of the SAF Science and Technology Board, the body that reviews nominations for the Award in Forest Science.
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"Although best known for his innovative and cutting edge research in the fields of forest sampling and process modeling, Dr. Valentine has also contributed substantially to knowledge about the population dynamics and herbivory of an important exotic forest insect--the gypsy moth."

Valentine has published more than 80 scientific papers, and his discoveries have been reported in journals of botany, ecology, entomology, forestry, pathology, statistics, and tree physiology, as well as in the chapters of several books.He may be best known for adapting a Japanese theory of tree form—the pipe model theory—to the forestry community and for his work in importance sampling, an efficient methodology for the unbiased estimation of biomass, volume, and elemental constituents of individual trees.An SAF member since 1977, Valentine holds a bachelor's degree from Rutgers University and masters and PhD degrees from Yale University.