Terrestrial Condition Assessment for National Forests of the USDA Forest Service in the Continental US

David Cleland, Keith Reynolds, Robert Vaughan, Barbara Schrader, Harbin Li and Larry Laing
Additional contact information
David Cleland: USDA Forest Service, National Forest System, Rhinelander, WI 54501, USA
Keith Reynolds: USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA
Robert Vaughan: Redcastle Resources, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT 84103, USA
Barbara Schrader: USDA Forest Service, Alaska Region, Juneau, AK 99801, USA
Harbin Li: USDA Forest Service, National Forest System, Washington, DC 20250, USA
Larry Laing: USDA Forest Service, National Forest System, Washington, DC 20250, USA

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 11, 1-19

Abstract: The terrestrial condition assessment (TCA) evaluates effects of uncharacteristic stressors and disturbance agents on land-type associations (LTAs) to identify restoration opportunities on national forest system (NFS) lands in the United States. A team of agency scientists and managers, representing a broad array of natural resource disciplines, developed a logic structure for the TCA to identify appropriate data sources to support analyses. Primary national data sources included observed insect- and pathogen-induced mortality, key critical loads for soil and the atmosphere, long term seasonal departures in temperature and precipitation, road densities, uncharacteristic wildfires, historical fire regime departure, wildfire potential, insect and pathogen risk, and vegetation departure from natural range of variability. The TCA was implemented with the ecosystem management decision support (EMDS) system, a spatial decision support system for landscape analysis and planning. EMDS uses logic models to interpret data, synthesizes information over successive layers of logic topics, and draws inferences about the ecological integrity of LTAs as an initial step to identifying high priority LTAs for landscape restoration on NFS lands. Results from the analysis showed that about 74 percent of NFS lands had moderate or better overall ecological integrity. Major impacts to ecological integrity included risk of mortality due to insects and disease, extent of current mortality, extent of areas with high and very high wildfire hazard potential, uncharacteristically severe wildfire, and elevated temperatures. In the discussion, we consider implications for agency performance reporting on restoration activities, and subsequent possible steps, including strategic and tactical planning for restoration. The objective of the paper is to describe the TCA framework with results from a national scale application on NFS lands.

Keywords: ecological integrity; stressors; disturbance agents; spatial decision support; restoration; assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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