Forest Health Monitoring

Abstract

The annual national report of the Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) 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 FHM national program. In this 20th edition in a series of annual reports, national survey data are used to identify recent geographic patterns of insect and disease activity. Satellite data are employed to detect geographic patterns of forest fire occurrence. Recent drought and moisture surplus conditions are compared across the conterminous United States. Data collected by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program are employed to detect regional differences in tree mortality. Nearly 20 years of FIA coarse woody material (CWM) data are examined across spatial scales to assess change over time in CWM biomass, diameter and decay class, and species composition. Case studies demonstrate the potential of rFIA, an open-source R package developed to improve the accessibility of FIA data and offer enhanced flexibility in estimation strategies, to advance forest health evaluation and monitoring. Six recently completed Evaluation Monitoring projects are summarized, addressing forest health concerns at smaller scales.