2012 Research Highlights
ForWarn Monitors Forests from Coast-to-Coast
Web-based tool provides a weekly snapshot of US forest conditions to aid forest managers
To help forest and natural resource managers rapidly detect, identify, and respond to unexpected changes in the nation’s forests, scientists with the Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center and its sister Center, the Pacific Northwest Research Station’s Western Wildland Environmental Assessment Center, have developed and released ForWarn. ForWarn is a monitoring and assessment tool that produces sets of national maps showing potential forest disturbances every 8 days and posts the results to the Internet for scientists and natural resource managers to examine. ForWarn compares current forest vegetation greenness with the "normal" greenness that would be expected for healthy vegetation for a specific location and day of the year, and then identifies areas appearing less green than expected. This provides a strategic national overview of potential forest disturbances that can focus and direct ground and aircraft observation efforts and resources. In addition to forests, ForWarn also tracks potential disturbances in rangeland vegetation and agricultural crops.
ForWarn is the first national-scale system of its kind developed specifically for forest disturbances. It has operated since January 2010 and has provided useful information about the location and extent of disturbances including tornadoes, wildfires, and extreme drought. Eastern and Western Threat Centers’ scientists released ForWarn in March 2012, initiated by a joint NASA and USDA Forest Service press release and followed by a series of online training sessions attended by almost 60 early-adopter state and federal forest managers. ForWarn is the result of ongoing cooperation among federal and university partners and can be accessed at http://www.forwarn.forestthreats.org.
Forest Service Partners/Collaborators: Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center; Forest Health Monitoring Program
External Partners/Collaborators: NASA Stennis Space Center; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; USGS EROS Data Center; University of North Carolina Asheville’s National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center
Contact: William W. Hargrove, EFETAC research ecologist, (828) 257-4846, william.w.hargrove@usda.gov
