CONTROL ID: 1488918

TITLE: ForWarn: A Cross-Cutting Forest Resource Management and Decision Support System Providing the Capacity to Identify and Track Forest Disturbances Nationally

AUTHORS (FIRST NAME, LAST NAME): William W Walter Hargrove¹, Joseph Spruce², Steve Norman¹, William Christie¹, Forrest M Hoffman³

INSTITUTIONS (ALL): 1. Eastern Forest Threat Center, USDA Forest Service, Asheville, NC, United States.
2. Computer Sciences Corporation, Supporting NASA Applied Science and Technology Project Office, Stennis Space Center, MS, United States.
3. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, United States.

ABSTRACT BODY: The Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center and Western Wildland Environmental Assessment Center of the USDA Forest Service have collaborated with NASA Stennis Space Center to develop ForWarn, a forest monitoring tool that uses MODIS satellite imagery to produce weekly snapshots of vegetation conditions across the lower 48 United States. Forest and natural resource managers can use ForWarn to rapidly detect, identify, and respond to unexpected changes in the nation’s forests caused by insects, diseases, wildfires, severe weather, or other natural or human-caused events. ForWarn detects most types of forest disturbances, including insects, disease, wildfires, frost and ice damage, tornadoes, hurricanes, blowdowns, harvest, urbanization, and landslides. It also detects drought, flood, and temperature effects, and shows early and delayed seasonal vegetation development. Operating continuously since January 2010, results show ForWarn to be a robust and highly capable tool for detecting changes in forest conditions.

ForWarn is the first national-scale system of its kind based on remote sensing developed specifically for forest disturbances. It has operated as a prototype since January 2010 and has provided useful information about the location and extent of disturbances detected during the 2011 growing season, including tornadoes, wildfires, and extreme drought. The ForWarn system had an official unveiling and rollout in March 2012, initiated by a joint NASA and USDA press release. The ForWarn home page has had 2,632 unique visitors since rollout in March 2012, with 39% returning visits. ForWarn was used to map tornado scars from the historic April 27, 2011 tornado outbreak, and detected timber damage within more than a dozen tornado tracks across northern Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. ForWarn is the result of an ongoing, substantive cooperation among four different government agencies: USDA, NASA, USGS, and DOE.

Disturbance maps are available on the web through the ForWarn Change Assessment Viewer at http://forwarn.forestthreats.org/fcav. No user id or password is required, and there is no cost. The Assessment Viewer operates within any popular web browser using nearly any type of computer. It lets users pan, zoom, and scroll around within ForWarn maps, and also contains an up-to-date library of co-registered, near real-time ancillary maps from diverse sources that allows users to assess the nature of particular forest disturbances and ascribe their most-likely causes. Users can check the current week’s U.S. Drought Monitor, USGS VegDRI maps, FHM Historical Aerial Disturbance Surveys, MODIS Cumulative Current Year Fire Detections, and many others. A “Share this map” feature lets users save the current map view and extent into a web URL, so that users can easily share what they are looking at inside the Assessment Viewer with others via an email, a document, or a web page. The ForWarn Rapid National Assessment Team examined more than 60 ForWarn forest disturbance events in 2011–2012, and issued over 30 alerts. We hope to automate forest disturbance alerts and supply them through various subscription services. Forest owners and managers would only be alerted to disturbances occurring near their own forest resources.

http://forwarn.forestthreats.org

KEYWORDS: [0845] EDUCATION / Instructional tools, [4341] NATURAL HAZARDS / Early warning systems, [0476] BIOGEOSCIENCES / Plant ecology, [0480] BIOGEOSCIENCES / Remote sensing.
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Additional Details

Previously Presented Material: 30% in Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing (PERS) 75(10): 1150–1156

Contact Details

CONTACT (NAME ONLY): William W Hargrove
CONTACT (E-MAIL ONLY): hnw at geobabble dot org
TITLE OF TEAM: