This was an excellent opportunity for a group of professors and graduate students in the EFB Faculty who are already interested in forest health monitoring. We have developed a study, built on some procedures and hypotheses that grew out of earlier forest monitoring projects of the Adirondacks and northern New York, that is designed to meet the needs of the National FHM Program in New York. We plan to sample southeastern and northeastern New York over the next 2 summers. The health of a forest is its ability to sustain itself if left undisturbed, or to recover rapidly if it is disturbed.
Forest health is measured on a relatively large spatial scale.
Although individual stands within an area may be undergoing change or disturbance, they do not significantly impact forest health if they are compensated for by complementary changes in other stands. Furthermore, we hope that our dataset will also be useful in the future as a baseline against which future changes in the forest health and structure can be measured. In addition, we collected data on the environmental conditions at the site including topographic, drainage, soil and land use history information, as well as digital photographs of the canopy structure. Each plot was marked so that it can be resampled in the future. For understory vegetation we measured percent cover by species.