FORM-TRACE: A formula-based method for tracking forest-management transitions at Harvard Forest from 1908 to 2026

Sasin Professor Dr. Nophea Sasaki explores the long-term changes in forest management are documented across reports, plans, and scientific papers written for different purposes and with changing vocabularies. This makes it difficult to show how a documentary record was converted into a temporal claim. FORM-TRACE is a formula-based workflow that records corpus decisions, extraction quality, domain terms, and calculations before interpretation. We demonstrate it with Harvard Forest and New England documents dated 1908–2026. Of 257 PDFs inspected, 215 met the analytical criteria; 201 were extracted and scored, 14 were flagged as unreadable, scanned, or corrupted, and 42 methods-support references were kept outside the scored corpus. The method provides:

• A corpus manifest and extraction log that expose inclusion, exclusion, and coverage gaps;
• A keyword-domain matrix and five numbered equations that produce document- and period-level indicators;
• Saved score tables, plot data, and validation records that allow independent checking without redistributing copyrighted PDFs.

FORM-TRACE measures documented attention rather than management performance and keeps interpretation separate from scoring. The full article is available through ScienceDirect.