Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center (SRS-4854)

The mission of the Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center ( (RWU-4854, EFETAC) is to generate knowledge and tools needed to anticipate and respond to environmental threats. The most serious threats to forests and the benefits they provide inevitably involve complex factors interacting across multiple spatial and temporal scales. The Center’s challenge is to maintain a comprehensive and integrated research program to tackle these complex issues, while delivering knowledge to forest landowners, managers, decision-makers, scientists, and other interested audiences in a timely, useful, and user-friendly manner. The Eastern Threat Center’s mission and governance were established in its original charter.

Objectives of the Center

• Evaluate the effects and consequences of multiple interacting stresses on eastern forest health;
• Increase knowledge and understanding of the risks, uncertainties, and/or benefits of multiple environmental stresses on eastern ecological conditions and socioeconomic values;
• Provide science-based decision support tools for policy formulation and land management in the eastern United States; and
• Provide land managers with credible predictions of potential severe disturbance in the East with sufficient warning to take preventative actions.

The Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center was established as part of the USDA Forest Service’s program under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, and is part of a network of early warning activities established by the Forest Service nationwide. The mission of the Eastern Threat Center is to generate, integrate, and apply knowledge to predict, detect, and assess environmental threats to public and private forests of the east, and to deliver this knowledge to managers in ways that are timely, useful, and user friendly. Center staff members are located in Asheville and Research Triangle Park, NC, and have regional, national, and international responsibilities.

The Center addresses problems related to the science of monitoring, assessment, and communication across four primary classes of environmental threats. These four classes include forest pests, weather and climate change, wildland fire, and changes in land use or land cover. Forest pests include both native and non-native invasive insects, pathogens, and plants. Weather and climate change include the more direct effects of extreme events such as hurricanes, ice storms, tornadoes, floods and droughts, and more broadly, the complex interactions of climate change and variability throughout ecosystems and landscapes. Wildland fire is a growing concern, presenting complex management tradeoffs related to people, ecosystems, communities, and landscapes. Land use/land cover change results from human-related development and urbanization, which creates intricate forest patterns within a mosaic of other landscape elements.

Southern Research Station
200 W.T. Weaver Blvd.
Asheville, NC 28804

Phone: 828-257-4832
Fax: 828-257-4894

Forestry Sciences Laboratory
3041 E. Cornwallis Road
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709

Phone: 919-549-4014
Fax: 919-549-4047

Problem Areas

Problem 1. Improved methods are needed for efficiently detecting forest threats, identifying meaningful change, and interpreting landscape patterns and processes.

Problem 2. Innovative approaches to assessment and prediction are needed to improve understanding of the realities and implications of ecosystem change.

Problem 3. Active information exchange is essential to ensuring that science is used in management, and equally important in fostering relevant and useful science.