Forest Health Monitoring: 2008 National Technical Report

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program’s annual national technical report has three objectives: (1) to present forest health status and trends from a national or a multi-State regional perspective using a variety of sources, (2) to introduce new techniques for analyzing forest health data, and (3) to report results of recently completed evaluation monitoring projects funded through the FHM national program. The first section of the report, which addresses the first two objectives, is organized according to the Criteria and Indicators for the Conservation and Sustainable Management of Temperate and Boreal Forests. A new phylogenetic approach is described for assessing the health of forest communities from an evolutionary perspective. Also depicted are new tools that allow the public to retrieve high-resolution maps of land cover patterns for specific locations. A methodology is described for the comparison of moisture conditions between different geographical areas and time periods. Aerial survey data are used to identify hotspots of insect and disease activity based on the relative exposure to defoliation- and mortality- causing agents. Satellite data are employed to detect geographic clusters of forest fire occurrence. Forest Inventory and Analysis data from 17 States are employed to detect regional differences in tree mortality. Phytopthora kernoviae is described as a developing threat to forest health, and a national map of P. kernoviae establishment risk is presented. Soil quality indicator data are analyzed to determine regional trends in soil chemistry characteristics that play an important role in the growth of forest trees. Finally, annual change in woody carbon stocks is presented in an initial assessment of down woody material carbon flux in the North Central United States. In the second section of the report, seven recently completed evaluation monitoring projects are summarized, addressing a variety of forest health concerns at smaller scales. These projects include an evaluation of exotic plant invasion vulnerability in Pennsylvania, a description of black ash decline in Minnesota, an assessment of white pine blister rust in Washington State, an evaluation of alder dieback impact on ecosystem nitrogen balance in Alaska, an assessment of the impact of Swiss needle cast on Douglas-fir in Oregon, an examination of the effect of Minnesota winter temperatures on eastern larch beetle, and an evaluation of native bunchgrass communities in Oregon and Idaho following fire.


Chapter 1. Introduction
Kevin M. Potter 1 Assessing and monitoring the health of these forests is, therefore, a critical and challenging task. While there is no universally accepted definition of forest health, a healthy forest ecosystem is likely to possess four characteristics (Kolb and others 1994): • The physical environment, biotic resources, and energy consumption networks to support productive forests during at least some successional stages • Resistance to catastrophic change and/or the ability to recover from catastrophic change at the landscape level • A functional equilibrium between supply and demand of essential resources (water, nutrients, light, growing space) for major portions of the vegetation • A diversity of seral stages and stand structures that provide habitat for many native species and all essential ecosystem processes The national Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program of the Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, produces this annual national technical report on the health of U.S. forests, using the Criteria and Indicators for the Conservation and Sustainable Management of Temperate and Boreal Forests (Montréal Process Working Group 2007) as an organizing framework.
The FHM national technical report has three specific objectives. The first is to present information about forest health from a national perspective, or from a multi-State regional perspective when appropriate, using data collected by the Forest Health Protection (FHP) and Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) programs of the Forest Service, in addition to data from other sources. The chapters in the first SECTION 1 Chapter 1 section of the report achieve this objective, in chapters organized according to the Criteria and Indicators for the Conservation and Sustainable Management of Temperate and Boreal Forests (Montréal Process Working Group 2007). These results stem from the ongoing national scale detection monitoring efforts from FHM and its cooperators, using a wide variety of regionalscale data and analysis techniques. While in-depth interpretation and analysis of specific geographic or ecological regions are beyond the scope of this report, the report presents information for the identification of areas that may require investigation at a finer scale.
The second objective of the report, also covered in section 1, is to present new techniques and new applications of established techniques for analyzing forest health data. Examples in this report are chapter 2, which presents a new set of statistical techniques for quantifying evolutionary variation among tree communities; chapter 3, which describes new tools that allow for the fine-scale display of national land cover mosaic maps; chapter 4, which introduces a newly developed drought index methodology that allows for the comparison of moisture conditions between geographical areas and across periods of time; and chapters 5 and 6, which use a Geographical Information System hotspot analysis to, respectively, detect significant clusters of forest mortality and defoliation and detect significant clusters of forest fire occurrences.
The third objective of the national technical report, addressed in its second section, is to present results of recently completed evaluation monitoring (EM) projects that have been funded through the FHM national program. These projects are funded by FHM to determine the extent, severity, and/or causes of forest health problems (Forest Health Monitoring 2009), generally at a finer scale than that addressed in the first section of the report. Each chapter in the second section of the report contains an overview of the EM project, key results, and contacts for more information. This objective is new to the national technical report, and these EM project summaries are included for the first time.

Organization of the Report
The Forest Service has adopted the Santiago Declaration and accompanying Criteria and Indicators for the Conservation and Sustainable Management of Temperate and Boreal Forests (Montréal Process Working Group 2007) as a forest sustainability assessment framework others 2001, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service 2004). It is appropriate, therefore, to note which criterion is addressed by each of the chapters in the first section of this FHM national technical report. The seven criteria are: Criterion 1-conservation of biological diversity Criterion 2-maintenance of productive capacity of forest ecosystems Criterion 3-maintenance of forest ecosystem health and vitality Criterion 4-conservation and maintenance of soil and water resources Criterion 5-maintenance of forest contribution to global carbon cycles Criterion 6-maintenance and enhancement of long-term multiple socioeconomic benefits to meet the needs of societies Criterion 7-legal, institutional, and economic framework for forest conservation and sustainable management While a complete evaluation of all the sustainability criteria is not appropriate in this report, it contains chapters associated with four criteria: criterion 1 (chapters 2 and 3); criterion 3 (chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8); criterion 4 (chapter 9); and criterion 5 (chapter 10).
When appropriate throughout this report, authors used Bailey's revised ecoregion provinces and sections (Cleland and others 2007) as a common ecologically based spatial framework for their forest health assessments ( fig. 1.1). Specifically, when the spatial scale of the data and the expectation of an identifiable pattern in the data were appropriate, authors used ecoregion sections as assessment units for their analyses. In Bailey's hierarchical system, the two broadest ecoregion scales, domains and divisions, are based on large ecological climate zones, while each division is broken into provinces based on vegetation macrofeatures (Bailey 1995). Provinces are further divided into sections, which may be thousands of square miles in extent and are expected to encompass regions similar in their geology, climate, soils, potential natural vegetation, and potential natural communities (Cleland and others 1997).  (Cleland and others 2007) and Alaska (Nowacki and Brock 1995). Ecoregion sections within each ecoregion province are shown in the same color.

Data Sources
A major source of data in FHM national technical reports has been the FIA program, which collects forest inventory information across all forest land ownerships in the United States. FIA maintains a network of more than 100,000 permanent ground plots across the conterminous United States, with a sampling intensity of approximately 1 plot per 2428.11 ha (6,000 acres). The FIA Program's phase 2 encompasses the annualized inventory measured on plots at regular intervals, with each plot surveyed every 5 years in most Eastern States, but with plots in the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Northwest regions surveyed once every 10 years (Reams and others 2005). The standard onesixth-acre plot ( fig. 1.2) consists of four 24-footradius subplots (approximately 0.0415 or 1/24 acre), on which field crews measure trees at least 5 inches in diameter. Within each of these subplots is nested a 6.8-foot-radius microplot (approximately 1/300th acre), on which crews measure trees smaller than 5 inches in diameter. A core-optional variant of the standard design includes four "macroplots," each with a radius of  FIA phase 3 plots are a subset of the phase 2 plots, with 1 phase 3 plot for every 16 standard phase 2 plots. In addition to traditional forest inventory measurements, data for a variety of important ecological indicators are collected from phase 3 plots, including tree crown condition, lichen communities, down woody material (DWM), soil condition, and vegetation structure and diversity. Additionally, data on ozone bioindicator plants are collected on a separate grid of plots. Prior to 2000 1 , these additional forest health indicators were measured as part of the FHM detection monitoring ground plot system (Palmer and others 1991 (Magarey and others 2007), the Biota of North America county-level plant species distribution data (Kartesz 2008), and the wildland-urban interface data (Radeloff and others 2005). SECTION 1 Chapter 1

The Forest Health Monitoring Program
Forest Health Monitoring is a national program designed to determine the status, changes, and trends in indicators of forest condition on an annual basis. The program covers all forested lands through a partnership encompassing the Forest Service, State foresters, and other State and Federal Agencies and academic groups (Forest Health Monitoring 2008). The FHM program utilizes data from a wide variety of data sources, both inside and outside the Forest Service, and develops analytical approaches for addressing forest health issues that affect the sustainability of forest ecosystems. It has five major activities ( fig. 1.3): • Detection monitoring-nationally standardized aerial and ground surveys to evaluate status and change in condition of forest ecosystems • Evaluation monitoring-projects to determine extent, severity, and causes of undesirable changes in forest health identified through detection monitoring • Intensive site monitoring-to enhance understanding of cause and effect relationships by linking detection monitoring to ecosystem process studies and to assess specific issues, such as calcium depletion and carbon sequestration, at multiple spatial scales • Research on monitoring techniques-to develop or improve indicators, monitoring systems, and analytical techniques, such as urban and riparian forest health monitoring, early detection of invasive species, multivariate analyses of forest health indicators, and spatial scan statistics • Analysis and reporting-synthesis of information from various data sources within and external to the Forest Service to produce issue-driven reports on the status of and change in forest health at national, regional, and State levels In addition to its national reporting efforts, FHM generates regional and State reports. These reports may be produced with FHM partners, both within the Forest Service and in State forestry and agricultural departments. Some examples are Keyes andothers (2003), Laustsen andothers (2003), Neitlich and others (2003), Steinman (2004), Lake and others (2006), Morin and others (2006), and others (2006, 2007). The Forest Health Highlights series, available on the FHM Web site at www. fs.fed.us/foresthealth/fhm/, is produced by the FHM regions in cooperation with their respective State partners. FHM and its partners also produce reports on monitoring techniques and analytical methods, such as Conkling (2004) andO'Neill andothers (2005).
For more information about efforts to determine the status, changes, and trends in indicators of the condition of U. The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program's annual national technical report has three objectives: (1) to present forest health status and trends from a national or a multi-State regional perspective using a variety of sources, (2) to introduce new techniques for analyzing forest health data, and (3) to report results of recently completed evaluation monitoring projects funded through the FHM national program. The first section of the report, which addresses the first two objectives, is organized according to the Criteria and Indicators for the Conservation and Sustainable Management of Temperate and Boreal Forests. A new phylogenetic approach is described for assessing the health of forest communities from an evolutionary perspective. Also depicted are new tools that allow the public to retrieve high-resolution maps of land cover patterns for specific locations. A methodology is described for the comparison of moisture conditions between different geographical areas and time periods. Aerial survey data are used to identify hotspots of insect and disease activity based on the relative exposure to defoliation-and mortalitycausing agents. Satellite data are employed to detect geographic clusters of forest fire occurrence. Forest Inventory and Analysis data from 17 States are employed to detect regional differences in tree mortality. Phytopthora kernoviae is described as a developing threat to forest health, and a national map of P. kernoviae establishment risk is presented. Soil quality indicator data are analyzed to determine regional trends in soil chemistry characteristics that play an important role in the growth of forest trees. Finally, annual change in woody carbon stocks is presented in an initial assessment of down woody material carbon flux in the North Central United States. In the second section of the report, seven recently completed evaluation monitoring projects are summarized, addressing a variety of forest health concerns at smaller scales. These projects include an evaluation of exotic plant invasion vulnerability in Pennsylvania, a description of black ash decline in Minnesota, an assessment of white pine blister rust in Washington State, an evaluation of alder dieback impact on ecosystem nitrogen balance in Alaska, an assessment of the impact of Swiss needle cast on Douglas-fir in Oregon, an examination of the effect of Minnesota winter temperatures on eastern larch beetle, and an evaluation of native bunchgrass communities in Oregon and Idaho following fire.