ForWarn

The Eastern and Western Threat Centers are collaborating with federal and university partners to develop strategic research components for a National Early Warning System. These tools help forest and natural resource managers rapidly detect, identify, and respond to unexpected changes in the nation’s forests impacted by insects, diseases, wildfires, extreme weather, or other natural or human-caused events. 

 Among these Early Warning System components is ForWarn, a satellite-based monitoring and assessment tool that provides a near-real-time national overview of vegetation greenness to direct attention and resources to locations where forest conditions seem unusual or abnormal. ForWarn is intended to complement and focus efforts of existing forest monitoring programs.

ForWarn is being developed in partnership with NASA Stennis Space Center, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of North Carolina Asheville’s National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center.