Kevin Potter

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) national program of the USDA Forest Service determines status, changes, and trends in indicators of forest condition across all forested lands. FHM reports, produced in cooperation with North Carolina State University, quantify forest area affected by insects and disease only on a yearly basis. Similarly, the forest health section of the Resource Planning Act (RPA) Assessment, which reports on status and trends of renewable resources on forest and rangelands, has summarized recent FHM reports and provides mortality statistics from the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) database. A retrospective analysis examining trends in different aspects of forest health over recent decades would provide context to annual FHM reports (highlighting the periodicity of threats), lay the foundation for developing forest health projections within the RPA Assessment, and inform land management planning.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program is a long term, national monitoring and research effort focusing on forest ecosystems. This interagency program is designed to assist resource managers and policy makers in managing forest resources in the United States, allocating funds for research and development, and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies. FHM national reporting efforts include an annual technical report that presents analysis and synthesis of technical information at national and multi-state levels as well as other publications that provide information about national forest health conditions and management priorities. Through the work in this agreement, the principal investigators and other research personnel will provide the Forest Health Monitoring Research Team of the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) with data analyses, natural resource assessments, and technical writing skills in support of the national Forest Health Monitoring Program’s annual forest health status and trends report, and other research, analysis, and reporting tasks. The principal investigators and other personnel will also provide support to the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program in documentation development and updates for field procedures and the FIA public database.

For this project, the PI’s expertise in biodiversity assessment, forest ecology and evolutionary biology will be applied to assist in analyzing data from across broad spatial scales to understand relationships between invasion and native forest biodiversity (including trait diversity and phylogenetic diversity). Specifically, he will generate, interpret and apply multiple measures of phylogenetic diversity on more than 120,000 USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis plots from across the United States, using a phylogenetic supertree that describes the hypothesized evolutionary relationships among more than 350 native tree species. Such metrics are expected to better reflect community functional diversity (including resistance to invasion) than traditional measures of biodiversity because evolutionarily distinct species should contribute more to the diversity of traits and functions present within a community. Additionally, the PI will assist in the assessment of the degree to which forest system complexity (including native and invasive plant biodiversity and structural complexity) influences spatial patterns of invasive insect occurrence. Specifically, he will compile, analyze and interpret low-altitude aerial and ground survey-based disturbance data from the USDA Forest Service Forest Health Protection (FHP) program, which identify forested areas experiencing defoliation and mortality as a result of insect pests and pathogens. Finally, the PI will also lend his general expertise in the analysis of Forest Inventory and Analysis data, and will assist in writing and editing journal manuscripts.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program is a long term, national monitoring and research effort focusing on forest ecosystems. This interagency program is designed to assist resource managers and policy makers in managing forest resources in the United States, allocating funds for research and development, and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies. FHM national reporting efforts include an annual technical report that presents analysis and synthesis of technical information at national and multi-state levels as well as other publications that provide information about national forest health conditions and management priorities. Through the work in this agreement, the principal investigators and other research personnel will provide the Forest Health Monitoring Research Team of the USFS Southern Research Station’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) with data analyses, natural resource assessments, and technical writing skills in support of the national Forest Health Monitoring Program’s annual forest health status and trends report, and other research, analysis, and reporting tasks. The principal investigators and other personnel will also provide support to the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program in documentation development and updates for field procedures and the FIA public database.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program is a long term, national monitoring and research effort focusing on forest ecosystems. This interagency program is designed to assist resource managers and policy makers in managing forest resources in the United States, allocating funds for research and development, and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies. FHM national reporting efforts include an annual technical report that presents analysis and synthesis of technical information at national and multi-state levels as well as other publications that provide information about national forest health conditions and management priorities. Through the work in this agreement, the principal investigators and other research personnel will provide the Forest Health Monitoring Research Team of the USFS Southern Research Station’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) with data analyses, natural resource assessments, and technical writing skills in support of the national Forest Health Monitoring Program’s annual forest health status and trends report, and other research, analysis, and reporting tasks. The principal investigators and other personnel will also provide support to the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program in documentation development and updates for field procedures and the FIA public database.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program is a long term, national monitoring and research effort focusing on forest ecosystems. This interagency program is designed to assist resource managers and policy makers in managing forest resources in the United States, allocating funds for research and development, and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies. FHM national reporting efforts include an annual technical report that presents analysis and synthesis of technical information at national and multi-state levels as well as other publications that provide information about national forest health conditions and management priorities. Through the work in this agreement, the principal investigators and other research personnel will provide the Forest Health Monitoring Research Team of the USFS Southern Research Station’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) with data analyses, natural resource assessments, and technical writing skills in support of the national Forest Health Monitoring Program’s annual technical report, and other research, analysis, and reporting tasks. The principal investigators and other personnel will also provide support to the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program in documentation development and updates for field procedures and the FIA public database.

A variety of threats, most importantly climate change and insect and disease infestation, will increase the likelihood that a given forest tree species will experience population-level extirpation or species-level extinction during the next century. The risk of such outcomes will vary because species differ widely in their physiological tolerances, life-history strategies, dispersal abilities, and susceptibility to pests and pathogens. Working with collaborators within the National Forest System of the USDA Forest Service and beyond, we propose coordinating a national multi-scale prioritization of forest tree species and populations for genetic conservation and monitoring, and establishing a process for conducting periodic, ongoing conservation assessments of forest tree species.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program is a long term, national research and monitoring effort focusing on forest ecosystems. This is an interagency program that is designed to assist resource managers and policy makers in managing forest resources in the United States, allocating funds for research and development, and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies. FHM national reporting efforts include an annual technical report that presents analysis and synthesis of technical information at national and multi-state levels as well as other publications that provide information about national forest health conditions and management priorities. Through the work in this agreement, the principal investigators and other research personnel will provide the Forest Health Monitoring Research Team of the USFS Southern Research Station’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) with data analyses, natural resource assessments, and technical writing skills in support of the national Forest Health Monitoring Program’s annual technical report, and other research, analysis, and reporting tasks. The principal investigators and other personnel will also provide support to the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program in documentation development and updates for field procedures and the FIA public database.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program is a long term, national research and monitoring effort focusing on forest ecosystems. This is an interagency program that is designed to assist resource managers and policy makers in managing forest resources in the United States, allocating funds for research and development, and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies. FHM national reporting efforts include an annual technical report that presents analysis and synthesis of technical information at national and multi-state levels as well as other publications that provide information about national forest health conditions and management priorities. Through the work in this agreement, the principal investigators and other research personnel will provide the Forest Health Monitoring Research Team of the USFS Southern Research Station’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) with data analyses, natural resource assessments, and technical writing skills in support of the national Forest Health Monitoring Program’s annual technical report, and other research, analysis, and reporting tasks. The principal investigators and other personnel will also provide support to the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program in documentation development and update for field procedures and the FIA public database.

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program is a long term, national research and monitoring effort focusing on forest ecosystems. This is an interagency program that is designed to assist resource managers and policy makers in managing forest resources in the United States, allocating funds for research and development, and evaluating the effectiveness of environmental policies. FHM national reporting efforts include an annual technical report that presents analysis and synthesis of technical information at national and multi-state levels as well as other publications that provide information about national forest health conditions and management priorities. Through the work in this agreement, the principal investigators and other research personnel will provide the Forest Health Monitoring Research Team of the USFS Southern Research Station’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (EFETAC) with data analyses, natural resource assessments, and technical writing skills in support of the national Forest Health Monitoring Program’s annual technical report, and other research, analysis, and reporting tasks.