Environmental Threat Assessment Centers
Forests and wildlands are subjected to a wide variety of environmental stresses such as insects, diseases, invasive species, drought, fire, severe weather, and various impacts from human activities. Sometimes these stresses happen individually, but more often they work in combination. The resulting disturbances can be severe and cause significant, lasting effects on ecological and socioeconomic values.
Current approaches to addressing these environmental stresses are limited and piecemeal. There is a need to integrate how we address interacting, multiple stresses, so land managers may anticipate disturbances and act to prevent or lessen the effects. The Eastern Forest and Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Centers were chartered in 2005 and directed to generate, integrate, and apply knowledge to predict, detect, and assess environmental threats to forests and wildlands, and to deliver this knowledge in timely, useful, and user friendly ways. The Centers have joined forces with other Forest Service units, federal and state government agencies, universities, and non-governmental partners to leverage resources and improve the collective capacity to meet this challenge.
Both Centers have initiated multipronged research programs that blend knowledge discovery, synthesis, and technology development and application. Experimentation and observation studies are used to understand causal relationships and interactions or quantify effects. Novel monitoring techniques and tools are being developed to help track forest and wildland conditions at multiple scales. Predictive modeling is used to forecast future conditions under various scenarios and simulate effects of management actions. Finally, tools for comparative risk assessment are being developed to help land managers and stakeholders explicitly consider the uncertainty inherent in any assessment.
