The Terrestrial Condition Assessment (TCA) is a mid-scale evaluation of conditions and stressors occurring across National Forest System lands. The primary goals of the TCA are to assist land managers in identifying restoration needs at a national scale, and provide the tools necessary for Regional and local applications including science delivery, data access, and guidance on analytical procedures. The TCA employs the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) logic model while evaluating ten ecological attributes. Attributes include current mortality due to insects and pathogens, invasive species, road density, climate exposure, air pollution, uncharacteristic fire frequency or severity, wildfire hazard, insect and pathogen risk, vegetation departure from historical conditions, and fire regime departure. With the exception of invasive species, attributes were characterized using nationally available data summarized within landscape-scale analysis units. EMDS was used to compute an overall terrestrial condition rating as well as ratings for individual attributes within 10,000 landscape analysis units. A web-based mapping application has been developed that presents results of the TCA EMDS model to field personnel without the need for sophisticated mapping software by the user.
Results/Conclusions
The analysis has been completed for all NFS Lands. Approximately 19% of NFS lands were in the very high, 37% high, 18% moderate, 11% low, and 15% very low condition classes, respectively. Conditions and stressors responsible for very low ratings include extensive mortality due to insects and disease, imminent risk of mortality due to insects and disease, wildfire hazard potential, and recent shifts in climatic regimes given elevated fall, winter and summer temperatures and reduced winter precipitation. Low ratings were also driven to a lesser degree by these factors, although additional factors also influenced ratings.