Eastern Threat Center Research Work Unit Description

Mission

The mission of the Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (“Eastern Threat Center” or “Center”) is to generate knowledge and tools needed to anticipate and respond to environmental threats. The most serious threats to forests involve complex factors interacting across multiple spatial and temporal scales. The Center’s challenge is to maintain a comprehensive and integrated research program to tackle these complex issues, while delivering knowledge to forest landowners, managers, decision-makers, scientists, and other interested audiences in a timely, useful, and user-friendly manner. The Eastern Threat Center’s mission and governance were established in its original 2005 charter.

The Center addresses problems related to the science of monitoring, assessment, prediction, and communication across four primary classes of environmental threats. These four classes include threats from biotic agents and processes, weather and climate change, wildland fire, and changes in land use or land cover. Biotic threats include both native and non-native invasive insects, pathogens, and plants. Weather and climate change include the direct effects of extreme events such as hurricanes, ice storms, tornadoes, floods, and droughts, and more broadly, the complex interactions of climate change and variability throughout ecosystems and landscapes across scales. Wildland fire is a major concern, presenting complex management tradeoffs related to people, ecosystems, communities, and landscapes. Land use/land cover change results from disturbances and human-related development, which creates intricate forest patterns within a mosaic of other landscape elements.

Problem Areas

Problem 1. Improved monitoring methods are needed to facilitate detection of forest threats, identify meaningful change, and interpret landscape patterns and processes associated with those threats.

Problem 2. Innovative approaches to assessment and prediction are needed to improve understanding of the realities and implications of ecosystem change.

Problem 3. Active information exchange is essential to ensuring that science is used in management, and equally important in fostering relevant and useful science.

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