biomass is a renewable organic material that is the living and recently dead organic material synthesized by plants and other organisms (battles 2015). quantifying forests and determining their value is an increasingly important concept in modern forestry. forests are often quantified by estimating their total above ground biomass in forest ecosystems (drake et al. 2003). this is significant as in the urban united states alone, trees store approximately 700 million tonnes of carbon with an estimated value of 14.3 billion dollars. understanding factors that increase a forest's biomass will have direct and indirect environmental and economic impacts (nowak and crane 2002). climate change is currently one of the largest threats to human health (martens 1999). greenhouse gases, a major cause of climate change, continue to rise. as a result, there are increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, nitrous oxide, and tropospheric ozone which contributes to rising global temperatures (novak and crane 2002). forests absorb atmospheric carbon and store it in plant tissues, which are approximately 50% carbon, helping to mitigate greenhouse gasses emitted by atmospheric carbon (drake et al. 2003, novak and crane 2002). [...]