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

The Terrestrial Condition Assessment (TCA) of the National Forest System (NFS, USDA Forest Service) is using the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) system to assess effects of uncharacteristic stressors and disturbance agents, with an emphasis on identifying restoration opportunities at national and regional scales. The 10,000 landscape analysis units under assessment within NFS lands are land-type associations (LTAs), which were developed by NFS regional staffs and by the agency’s Remote Sensing Applications Center (RSAC) in areas lacking LTA maps.

EMDS is a spatial decision support system for landscape analysis and planning. In its analysis phase, EMDS uses logic models to interpret data, synthesize information over successive layers of logic topics, and draw inferences about the strength of evidence for suitable terrestrial condition in LTAs as an initial step to identifying high priority LTAs for landscape restoration on NFS lands. A team of senior agency scientists and managers, representing a broad array of natural resource disciplines, was assembled in 2012 to develop a logic structure for the EMDS TCA model and to identify appropriate data sources to support analyses. Primary data inputs used in the TCA model currently include observed insect- and pathogen-induced mortality, key critical loads for soil and the atmosphere, road densities, uncharacteristic wildfires, recent trends in seasonal temperature and precipitation relative to the previous 100 years, historical fire regime departure, wildfire potential, insect and pathogen risk, and vegetation departure from natural range of variability. The TCA logic also accounts for effects of terrestrial invasive species, but these are currently represented as missing data. Under the general logic topic of uncharacteristic disturbance, national analyses only consider uncharacteristic wildfire. However, applications of the model at smaller spatial extents such as Regions and Forests have the option to consider a variety of additional impacts, such as landslides, mining activity, blowdown, and flooding, if quantitative or qualitative data are available to characterize these impacts. Logic topics for these additional impacts have been built into the national model, but the topics are ignored in the national analysis (e.g., turned off). An initial TCA assessment was completed in October 2015. Since that time, the TCA core team has been meeting with NFS Regional staffs to get reviews of the national product, and feedback on how to improve model accuracy for regional applications. Regional reviews will be completed by May 2016, and near term plans are to train regional staffs to adapt the national model for regional application.

For further information, contact: Keith Reynolds, Pacific Northwest Research Station, email: kreynolds@fs.fed.us

and check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_Management_Decision_Support or http://emds.mountain-viewgroup.com/