Forest Health Monitoring: national status, trends, and analysis 2010

Abstract

The annual national report of the Forest Health Monitoring Program of the Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, presents forest health status and trends from a national or multi-State regional perspective using a variety of sources, introduces new techniques for analyzing forest health data, and summarizes results of recently completed Evaluation Monitoring projects funded through the national Forest Health Monitoring Program. In this 10th edition in the annual series of national reports, survey data are used to identify geographic patterns of insect and disease activity. Satellite data are employed to detect geographic clusters of forest fire occurrence. Data collected by the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program of the Forest Service are employed to detect regional differences in tree mortality. Established forest fragmentation assessment protocols are used to characterize and compare the fragmentation of landcover types nationally. A new methodology for the comparison of moisture conditions among different geographical areas and time periods is described. Forest Inventory and Analysis data are used to conduct an empirical assessment of the Nation’s standing dead tree resources. The potential impacts of climate change on forest soil critical acid load limits are explored. Seven recently completed Evaluation Monitoring projects are summarized, addressing forest health concerns at smaller scales.

Titles contained within Forest Health Monitoring: national status, trends, and analysis 2010

• Introduction
• Large-scale patterns of insect and disease activity in the conterminous United States and Alaska from the national insect and disease detection survey, 2009
• Large-scale patterns of forest fire occurrence in the conterminous United States and Alaska, 2009
• Tree mortality
• Fragmentation of forest, grassland, and shrubland
• An improved method for standardized mapping of drought conditions
• Standing dead tree resources in forests of the United States
• Climate change impacts on forest soil critical acid loads and exceedances at a national scale
• Changes in fragmentation of western Washington forest land (Project WC-EM-08-01)
• Evaluating key landscape features of a climate- induced forest decline (Project WC-EM-07-01)
• Mountain pine beetle in lodgepole pine: mortality and fire implications (Project INT-F-07-03)
• Assessment of balsam woolly adelgid damage to eastern Washington and Oregon subalpine fir (Project WC-F-07-01)
• Health, reproduction, and fuels in whitebark pine in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area in central Idaho (Project INT-F-05-02)
• Assessing mortality and regeneration of larch (Larix laricina) after a 1999-2004 landscape level outbreak of the larch sawfly (Pristiphora erichsonii) in Alaska (Project WC-EM-08-03)
• Bugs and burns: effects of fire on ponderosa pine bark beetle (Project INT-F-07-02)

Keywords

Drought, fire, forest health, forest insects and disease, fragmentation, nonnative species, tree mortality

Citation

Potter, Kevin M.; Conkling, Barbara L., eds. 2013. Forest Health Monitoring: national status, trends, and analysis 2010. Gen. Tech. Rep. SRS-GTR-176. Asheville, NC: U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Southern Research Station. 164 p.