Problem Area 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 1a: MONITORIGN METHODS AND TOOLS. Monitoring to detect forest threats, characterize their extent and severity, and track their effects on forest conditions through time requires new methods and tools for processing, measuring, and interpreting observational data, as well as new techniques to combine multiple data sources in novel ways.
Problem 1b: INDICATOR DEVELOPMENT. To enable reporting about forest threats at regional, national, or global scales, monitoring data must be summarized using indicators. Foundational research may be necessary to determine which indicators best satisfy information needs, develop robust indicators from observed data, and define baseline conditions that provide suitable frames of reference.
Our ability to recognize and track a wide variety of threats is essential for effective forest management. Consistent with departmental and agency strategic plans, these threats include climate change and extreme weather, wildland fire, native and non-native insects and diseases, invasive plants, and land use/cover change. To address them, Center research includes: 1) providing up-to-date information regarding specific threats to places, people, ecosystem services, and natural resources of concern, particularly with measures that are useful at scale; and 2) developing specialized tools and techniques to improve forest and landscape monitoring more generally.
Monitoring can be surprisingly difficult, particularly when information is required by diverse end users and when it must be compiled across jurisdictions. Sometimes research has yet to resolve suitable measures or indicators that adequately capture a threat or its impacts. Indicators are metrics or measures that can be interpreted consistently across different times, ecosystems, regions, and jurisdictions. Relevant data are rarely collected or available uniformly, and perhaps worse, measures are often not uniformly meaningful across scales or geographies because of differences in forest characteristics. Sometimes monitoring can be improved with more precise measurements, although this can present challenges for inventory design or monitoring technologies. In other cases, efficiency demands that coarse metrics be developed that provide broad hierarchical and contextual insight. Regional to global scale characterizations of forest conditions and threats require standardized indicators that are often not yet developed. In response to these varied needs, Center research includes the development of spatial measures and indicators that target specific scales and others that function across scales. Center researchers also work to improve monitoring across a range of temporal scales including near-real-time, annual, and multi-year periods. Development of consistent long-term monitoring datasets is a necessary precursor for tracking long-term change and for developing predictive models.
Center researchers utilize a variety of regularly collected data streams, including from satellite imagery, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data, weather and hydrological station observations, and other specialized datasets. Research involves developing innovative ways to exploit existing data, such as deriving functional metrics for detecting potential threats, assessing forest conditions, and tracking change across scales. These new monitoring methods, metrics, and strategies must be evaluated for their sensitivity and effectiveness for their intended purposes. In some instances, innovative foundational research is necessary to overcome monitoring challenges.
The Center’s monitoring research includes direct measures of forest conditions, such as forest canopy cover, the disturbance processes or stressors that cause change, and the secondary effects of forest changes, such as impacts to streamflow or other ecosystem services. Integrating these eclectic measures is important for building and calibrating models and for understanding how future changes can affect the values that we care about and that are emphasized in agency and partner priorities.
Some forest threats are particularly difficult to monitor at both high resolution and at broad scales. For example, many non-native invasive insects and pathogens are narrowly host-specific, and the uncertain distribution of hosts makes it challenging to contextualize impacts at scale. Other impacts are slow to manifest, and this requires development of monitoring techniques that meaningfully capture long-term change.
Monitoring can be exploratory, designed to determine status or to summarize conditions, or it can be confirmatory, designed to verify or test results of prior management actions. In either case, monitoring is more likely to be utilized and maintained long-term if it is efficient and cost-effective.
