Introduction: Forest Health Monitoring: National Status, Trends and Analysis, 2014
Creators: name: Potter, Kevin
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: 70505 Forestry Pests, Health and Diseases
subject: FOS: Agriculture, forestry and fisheries
subject: FOS: Agriculture, forestry and fisheries

description: Potter, K.M. 2015. Introduction. Chapter 1 in K.M. Potter and B.L. Conkling, eds., Forest Health Monitoring: National Status, Trends and Analysis, 2014. General Technical Report SRS-209. Asheville, North Carolina: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Research Station. pp. 5-16. <br><br>Potter, K.M. 2016. Introduction. Chapter 1 in K.M. Potter and B.L. Conkling, eds., Forest Health Monitoring: National Status, Trends and Analysis, 2015. General Technical Report SRS-213. Asheville, North Carolina: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Research Station. p. 5-17. <br><br><br>Healthy ecosystems are those that are stable and sustainable, able to maintain their organization and autonomy over time while remaining resilient to stress (Costanza 1992). Healthy forests are vital to our future (Edmonds and others 2011), and consistent, large-scale, and long-term monitoring of key indicators of forest health status, change, and trends is necessary to identify forest resources deteriorating across large regions (Riitters and Tkacz 2004). This national report, the 14th in an annual series sponsored by the Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program of the Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, quantifies the status of, changes to, and trends in several broadly defined indicators of forest health. These indicators include, among others, forest insect and disease activity, wildland fire occurrence, drought, tree mortality, and forest fragmentation. The national FHM Pprogram is designed to determine the status, changes, and trends in indicators of forest condition on an annual basis, and covers all forested lands through a partnership that encompasses the Forest Service, State foresters, and other State and Federal agencies and academic groups (chapter 1). The FHM program Program utilizes data from a wide variety of data sources, both inside and outside the Forest Service, and develops analytical approaches for addressing forest health issues that affect the sustainability of forest ecosystems. The analyses and results outlined in sections 1 and 2 of this FHM annual national report offer a snapshot of the current condition of U.S. forests from a national or multi-State regional perspective, incorporating baseline investigations of forest ecosystem health, examinations of change over time in forest health metrics, and assessments of developing threats to forest stability and sustainability. For datasets collected on an annual basis, analyses are presented from 2013 data. For datasets collected over several years, analyses are presented at a longer temporal scale. Chapters describe new techniques for collecting and analyzing forest health data as well as new applications of established techniques. Finally, section 3 of this report presents summaries of results from recently completed Evaluation Monitoring (EM) projects that have been funded through the FHM national program to determine the extent, severity and/or causes of specific forest health problems (FHM 2014).<br>