2013 Partnership Highlights
Evaluating the Health of the Nation’s Forests
University collaboration produces annual reports to heighten forest health awareness
Annual reports describing the health of the nation’s forests provide forest managers, scientists, and decision makers with current and relevant information about issues impacting forest resources. An ongoing cooperative arrangement between the Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center and North Carolina State University (NCSU) enables Center scientists and NCSU researchers to collaboratively produce annual reports that synthesize data from a variety of sources to provide an overview of forest health at regional to national reporting scales. Individual chapters, contributed by specialists nation-wide, address a wide variety of forest health topics such as tree mortality, drought, geographic hotspots of insect and disease occurrences, large-scale patterns of wildland fire, forest fragmentation, and invasive plants. The annual reports also include a summary of targeted investigations funded by Forest Service Forest Health Protection which provide more detailed information about specific forest health anomalies and threats. The reports serve as a useful guide to forest health trends that may require further monitoring and research.
Forest Service Partners/Collaborators: Forest Health Monitoring Program, Forest Inventory and Analysis
External Partners/Collaborators: North Carolina State University
Contact: Kurt Riitters, Eastern Threat Center research ecologist, (919) 549-4015, kurt.h.riitters@usda.gov
