Document Actions
Original EFETAC Charter (2005)
United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service
Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center
Asheville, North Carolina
Center Charter 2005
Title: Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center, Asheville, North Carolina
Primary Participating Units: USDA Forest Service State and Private Forestry, Forest Health Protection, Fire and Aviation Management; USDA Forest Service Research, Southern Research Station (Lead); USDA Forest Service National Forest System, Forest and Rangeland Management, Southern Region
Center Location: Asheville, North Carolina
Center Manager: Southern Research Station
Justification
Forests of the east are subjected to a wide variety of environmental stresses such as insects, diseases, invasive species, drought, fire, hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, and development. Sometimes these things happen individually, but often they come in combination. The resulting disturbances can be severe and cause significant, lasting effects on ecological and socioeconomic values.
Our current ability to predict, detect, and assess these environmental stresses is piecemeal. There is a need to integrate how we deal with interacting, multiple stresses, so land managers may anticipate disturbances and act to prevent or lessen the effects.
To address the goals of Title VI of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003, the USDA, Forest Service, working with other federal and state partners, is developing an integrated, national Early Warning System (EWS) to identify, detect and rapidly respond to environmental threats. The Forest Service is establishing this coordination Center in the East to be part of a program of ongoing EWS activities. This coordination Center will focus on multi-scale assessment, monitoring, and evaluation of forest health threats in the East. It will have an emphasis on hardwood forests, but it will also include threatened coniferous forests. Besides developing and utilizing new science and advanced technologies to inventory, monitor, characterize, and assess changes in eastern forest conditions, the work would emphasize applicable early warning products that landowners, forest managers and communities could use to anticipate disturbances and take appropriate, preemptive actions.
To fulfill these needs, an eastern Center is established through this charter. The activities and products of this Center will serve forest managers in the Forest Service, Department of Interior, Department of Defense, tribes, state agencies, industry, and the public at large. In addition, the Center will support development of science-based policy to manage forests in the East to prevent or lessen the impact of severe biotic and abiotic disturbances.
Mission, Goals, and Objectives
Mission. The mission of the Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center is to generate, integrate, and apply knowledge to predict, detect, and assess environmental threats to public and private forests of the east, and to deliver this knowledge to managers in ways that are timely, useful, and user friendly. Emphases will be on eastern hardwoods but will also include pines.
Goal. The goal of the Center is to support effective policy for and management of potential and existing environmental threats to eastern forests with the desired outcomes of:
- reduced likelihood of severe disturbances through better informed management strategies;
- amelioration of the effects of disturbances on the multiple values associated with forests;
- improved efficiency and access to information through a centralized source;
- improved tracking of changes in hazard, risk, and consequences of disturbances over time and space; and
- funding strategies and prioritizations based on better informed management decisions.
Objectives. The objectives of Center efforts are to:
- Evaluate the effects and consequences of multiple interacting stresses on eastern forest health;
- Increase knowledge and understanding of the risks, uncertainties, and/or benefits of multiple environmental stresses on eastern ecological conditions and socioeconomic values;
- Provide science-based decision support tools for policy formulation and land management in the eastern United States; and
- Provide land managers with credible predictions of potential severe disturbance in the East with sufficient warning to take preventative actions.
Resume of Work to Meet Objectives
The primary focus of the Center is to deliver threat assessment products for the forests of the eastern United States at multiple spatial and temporal scales in a variety of formats that include, but are not limited to:
- syntheses of existing knowledge and ongoing efforts to forecast the timing, potential extent, and severity of environmental threats;
- identification of gaps in knowledge related to assessing cumulative risk of multiple interacting disturbances;
- quantification and analysis of the cumulative risk from multiple interacting threats using probabilistic models to predict, with estimates of uncertainty, the likelihood of severe or uncharacteristic disturbances;
- assessments of the range of potential ecologic and socioeconomic consequences of severe or uncharacteristic disturbances; and
- delivery of Center products through a variety of user-friendly technology transfer mechanisms useful to land managers including narrative analysis, summaries, graphics, and maps in sufficient lead time for agencies to take preventive actions. More...
