Two decades of annual national forest health check-ups
For 21 consecutive years, researchers from the USDA Forest Service and its partners at North Carolina State University have cooperated annually to track the status and trends of forest health across the United States. The latest installment of these annual reports was released in May 2022. The report, which is the only national summary of forest health undertaken on an annual basis, is sponsored by the Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) program of the Forest Service and published by the Southern Research Station.
Forests constantly change because of tree mortality and growth, weather events and climate trends, and disturbances from stressors including fire, insects, and diseases. Annual assessments of forest health are key to understanding whether year-to-year changes are part of longer-term trends. These assessments require consistent, broad-scale, and long-term monitoring of forest health indicators — and the participation of multiple federal, state, academic, and private partners. Every year, scientists from across the USDA Forest Service as well as university researchers, state partners, and many other experts identify ecological resources whose condition is deteriorating across large regions, potentially in subtle ways. The resulting report is the only national summary of forest health undertaken on an annual basis. The latest edition was published in May 2022 as a General Technical Report titled Forest Health Monitoring: National Status, Trends, and Analysis 2021. The goal of the report is to identify ecological resources whose condition is deteriorating. The 2021 report includes short- and long-term forest health assessments from the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, and the U.S. Caribbean territories. Specific chapters address status and trends in forest wildfire, drought, insect and disease effects, tree mortality, and satellite-detected canopy disturbance.
