2015 Accomplishment Highlights

Assessing Emerging Drought Threats to National Forests and Grasslands – From recreation opportunities to supplies of clean water and air, National Forests and Grasslands provide numerous benefits to the American people. These important ecosystem functions are increasingly threatened by drought (the lack of water in the right amount at the right time) due to global climate change, but the effects of drought on natural resources are difficult to assess and quantify nationally. Scientists estimated regional impacts of drought on watershed water yield and ecosystem productivity across the conterminous United States using a large-scale Water Supply Stress Index (WaSSI) simulation model.

Carbon Cycles in Forested Wetlands Face an Uncertain Future under Climate Change – Coastal forested and non-forested wetlands provide many important ecosystem services, including storage of large amounts of carbon in soils and vegetation. Researchers studied soil respiration in a coastal forested wetland during two contrasting hydrologic years to determine how periods of flooding and drought influence the release of carbon dioxide, a climate-warming greenhouse gas.

Climate Change Planning Tool Aids Development of Pioneering Forest Plan – The Francis Marion National Forest is the first in the nation to release a draft revised forest plan under the 2012 Planning Rule. Working with the Template for Assessing Climate Change Impacts and Management Options (TACCIMO), forest planners outlined an integrated approach for responding to climate change through adaptive management.

Climate Hubs Tool Shed: Connecting Users to Decision Support Tools – The Climate Hubs Tool Shed is an online, searchable database of tools (data-driven, interactive websites, and mobile apps) that can assist land managers, land owners, and extension professionals in adapting working lands to changing conditions.

Developing Tools for Evaluating Ecosystem Service Sustainability in the Appalachians – Natural resource management and conservation stakeholders have a vested interest in understanding the sustainability of valued ecosystem services in the modern context of rapid environmental and social change. Scientists and partners are taking inventory of ecosystem services in the Appalachian mountain region to assess their vulnerabilities to environmental stressors. New online tools synthesize existing knowledge and deliver resources to managers and the public for understanding ecosystem service sustainability.

Evaluating the Health of the Nation’s Forests – “So, how are the trees doing?” For more than a decade, forest monitoring professionals have been answering that question in an informative series of national reports on forest health. An ongoing cooperative arrangement enables the production of annual reports that analyze data from a variety of sources to provide an overview of forest health at regional to national reporting scales.

Examining the Role of Humans in the Spread of Invasive Species – Scientists and collaborators have contributed innovative research to the field of forest pest risk assessment by focusing on pathways for the human-assisted spread of forest pest species, including merchandise imports and firewood transport. Research results anticipate where and how often invasive alien forest insects are likely to be established to assist U.S. and Canadian decision makers and offer guidance for border control efforts, post-border surveillance, and rapid-response measures.

Fertilized Pines Use Water More Efficiently But May Suffer Worse in Droughts – Researchers experimented with fertilization treatments and simulated drought during a two-year study in a loblolly pine plantation. Fertilized trees achieved more wood production with less water, but this may also indicate that the vulnerability of plantations to severe drought will increase with fertilization.

Forest Cover Plays a More Critical Role in Regulating Water Resources in the Piedmont than in the Mountains and Coastal Plain – The mountains, Piedmont, and coastal plain are three distinct land provinces across the southeastern United States. Population density, topography, and types of forests are unique to each region, resulting in a range of different water resource needs and responses to land cover changes. Understanding how streamflow will respond to land disturbances such as timber harvesting and development planning across these regions can provide useful information to land managers as they set streamflow targets needed to maintain healthy fish habitat and meet human water demand.

Forest Pest Risk Maps Reveal Uncertainties – Scientists and collaborators have furthered forest pest risk assessment by developing new techniques to account for uncertainty in the inputs and underlying assumptions of forest pest risk maps as well as the analytical models used to create them. Key advances include a methodology that allows analysts to account for these uncertainties from the perspective of a “risk-averse” decision maker who prefers to take management action in cases where the risk of pest invasion is more certainly known.

ForWarn Provides Past and Present Views of Forest Disturbances in All Terrestrial Vegetation – The satellite-based ForWarn monitoring and assessment system is now finishing its sixth year of operation. To allow land managers to see vegetation disturbances that occurred before ForWarn began operating, researchers back-calculated satellite data collected beginning in January 2006 and developed retrospective map products. These maps, along with other archived and current maps of vegetation disturbance, are available through a recently released "all-lands" ForWarn viewer.

Genetics Matter: Forest Tree Species at Risk – To conserve the genetic foundation tree species need to survive and adapt in the face of threats to forest health, forest management decisions must consider how genetic diversity is distributed across species’ ranges. The lead analyst for range-wide genetic variation studies is producing results that are influencing management decisions for three at-risk species: eastern hemlock and Carolina hemlock, which are being decimated by an exotic insect; and ponderosa pine, a species with isolated populations of special concern given their susceptibility to climate change, development, and bark beetles.

A Global Classification of Contemporary Fire Regimes – Fire regimes characterize a basic ecological process that regulates and maintains ecosystems worldwide, yet are not well understood in many areas. Researchers used satellite-based data to increase understanding of fire as an ecological and social process and inform management strategies.

High Forest Productivity Often Comes at the Expense of Soil Carbon Storage – Researchers are studying the role of managed forests in regional carbon, water, and energy exchange to understand how managed forests contribute to land-atmosphere feedbacks and climate dynamics.

How do Fires Affect Stream Flow in the Lower 48 United States? – Fire effects on water supplies vary by region, pre-fire conditions, fire severity, and post-fire rainfall. Analysis of post-fire streamflow in 30 watersheds across the contiguous United States shows a variety of runoff responses and provides insight into water resource vulnerability.

How Fragmented are the Nation’s Forests? – At the request of Congress every ten years, Forest Service scientists take a hard look at the status, trends, and projected future of the nation’s forest and range resources. The result is the Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment—a definitive, periodic national assessment produced under the guidance of Washington Office Staff and a useful reference for congressional staffers, federal and non-federal agencies, and organizations interested in forest trends.

Invasive Plants’ Success Depends on Native Species Richness and Biomass – For better control and management of invasive plant species, research must uncover the factors that contribute to habitat invasibility, degree of invasion, and species invasiveness as well as how these factors can be measured. Scientists are collecting and comparing extensive data on habitat characteristics and invasibility from diverse ecosystems in U.S. forests and other ecosystems around the world to identify these factors.

Partnership Network Turns Climate Change Science into Adaptation Action – The USDA Southeast Regional Climate Hub is leveraging collaborative partnerships to address regional climate change science needs, identify potential climate change effects, and communicate these findings to extension professionals and stakeholders.

Researchers Devise a New Way to Crunch Massive LiDAR Data to Map Forest Structure – A remote sensing method known as LiDAR uses reflections from an airborne laser to measure distances between the aircraft and ground-level features, allowing scientists to create three-dimensional pictures of the earth’s surface and the forests growing on its surface. However, the volume of data produced makes raw LiDAR maps unintelligible and difficult to interpret. New maps provide a straightforward way for forest and wildlife managers to utilize LiDAR results to understand forest aboveground structure, which is an important habitat characteristic for many species of animals and plants.

Researchers Map Seasonal Greening in U.S. Forests, Fields, and Urban Areas – With each new growing season, land managers can use the assessment tool ForWarn to begin monitoring the growth and development of vegetation. Researchers have devised a way for ForWarn to more precisely characterize the start of seasonal greening, or “greenup,” and compare its timing with that of the 14 previous years. Such seasonal timing information helps ForWarn users to distinguish and identify sooner the impacts of disturbances such as weather events and insect pests.

SERCH LIGHTS Alerts Help Land Managers Prepare for Drought – Accurate, timely, and actionable information regarding tree and crop stresses is essential to minimizing loss and maintaining production. The SERCH LIGHTS alert service provides site-specific, current and near-term projections of drought stress as well as links to adaptive management tools and resources to address drought risks to forest and crop productivity. Researchers are expanding SERCH LIGHTS to address a wide range of stresses and adaptive management solutions.

Southern Research Station Supports Native American Graduate Students – The Southern Research Station and the Intertribal Timber Council Education and Research Subcommittee entered into an agreement in 2014 to support Native American graduate and undergraduate students in their research endeavors. In 2015, the scholarship program provided five Native students with $4,000 each to help offset the costs of their research projects. The scholarship awards were based upon the merit of the students’ research proposals, potential benefits to tribal communities, and research dissemination plans.

Understanding how Phenological Patterns Represent Successional Changes in Forest Recovery and Resilience – Forested ecosystems interact with disturbances in their environment over scales that conventional survey methods may not uniformly capture. Researchers are developing a method from information theory—a mathematical process for quantifying information—to leverage satellite-based monitoring of forests and grassland ecosystems in order to follow large-scale phenological changes in plant activity (seasonal cycles of vegetation development). This promising new technique reveals how phenological patterns relate to successional changes (ecosystem development over time) and disturbance responses, and could help land managers understand how today’s landscape changes might predict eventual outcomes from past disturbances.

Understanding the Importance of Forest Biodiversity – Researchers have long hypothesized that greater biodiversity can increase the goods and services provided by forested ecosystems and are now seeking to understand how tree biodiversity influences the ecological functions of forests. In broad-scale studies, they found that forests with greater biodiversity have accumulated greater amounts of biomass, and that measurements of biodiversity can serve as indicators of forest resistance to invasion by nonnative plant species.

Which Tree Species are Most at Risk? – Several threats will increase the risk that forest trees could experience population-level or species-level extinction, but differences in species traits could drive widely varying responses to these threats. Prioritizing species for management and conservation activities is critical for the USDA Forest Service and other federal and state agencies. To address this challenge, a scientist is leading the four-year Project CAPTURE (Conservation Assessment and Prioritization of Forest Trees Under Risk of Extirpation) to establish a framework to determine which forest tree species to target for monitoring, management, and conservation.