Two decades of annual national forest health check-ups
The Forest Health Monitoring report for 2021 is now available. It focuses on how disease, drought, fire, insects, and other stressors affect forests.
For 21 consecutive years, researchers from the USDA Forest Service and partners at North Carolina State University have tracked the status and trends of forest health across the U.S. Annual assessments of forest health are key to understanding whether year-to-year changes are part of longer-term trends.
Forests constantly change because of tree mortality and growth, weather events and climate trends, and disturbances from stressors including fire, insects, and diseases. These assessments require consistent, broad-scale, and long-term monitoring of forest health indicators — and the participation of multiple federal, state, academic, and private partners. Every year, scientists from across the Forest Service as well as university researchers, state partners, and many other experts identify ecological resources whose condition is deteriorating across large regions, potentially in subtle ways.
The 2021 report includes short- and long-term forest health assessments from the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, and the U.S. Caribbean territories. Specific chapters address status and trends in forest wildfire, drought, insect and disease effects, tree mortality, and satellite-detected canopy disturbance
The report is the only national summary of forest health undertaken on an annual basis and is sponsored by the Forest Health Monitoring program of the Forest Service. The 2021 edition was published in 2022 as a General Technical Report. The report for 2022 will be available in the summer of 2023.