Treesearch

The walnut twig beetle, a native phloem-boring bark beetle originating on Arizona walnut, has invaded urban, orchard, and native forest habitats throughout the USA as well as in Italy. Although the beetle has been associated with dead and dying walnut trees indigenous to riparian forests of the Southwest, the primary impact appears to have been on the health of landscape black walnut trees in urban and peri-urban sites in western US states, and in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia. This has been reflected in numbers of trees removed and tree removal costs. In addition, trees have been...

Horizon scanning produces a significant amount of information about potential change that may be on the horizon. To be useful for the intended audiences, this large volume of information must be sorted, condensed, analyzed, interpreted, and presented in formats that fit the needs of diverse users. This paper describes the various current and planned communication outputs of the Forest Futures Horizon Scanning project, including the scanning library, blog posts about significant scanning hits or emerging themes, a periodic digest summarizing interesting scanning hits, detailed articles and...

A clear and concise guide for volunteer scanners is essential for creating a rigorous, consistent, and sustainable horizon scanning system. The scanner guide written for the Forest Futures Horizon Scanning system is presented in its entirety. The guide includes an overview of the USDA Forest Service; an explanation of horizon scanning and its goals, uses, and stakeholders; a "how to" guide for installing and using the Web-based system for collecting scanning hits; a description of the domain map used in tagging scanning hits; and a quick guide to getting started in scanning.

Horizon scanning is a method for detecting and interpreting the implications of emerging issues and other signals of change, both within and outside of an organization or field. Anticipating possible changes that may affect an organization is a first step toward strategic thinking, planning, and actions that can help prepare it for an uncertain future. Developing insight into emerging possible futures—or strategic foresight—can help decisionmakers respond proactively to seize opportunities and mitigate potential threats. Decisionmaking in forestry and other natural resource management...

A novel approach is presented to analyze smoke exposure and provide a metric to quantify health-related impacts. Our results support the current understanding that managing low-intensity fire for ecological benefit reduces exposure when compared to a high-intensity full suppression fire in the Sierra Nevada of California. More frequent use of fire provides an opportunity to mitigate smoke exposure for both individual events and future emission scenarios. The differences in relative exposure between high-intensity, low-intensity, and prescribed burn were significant (P value < 0.01)....

The external environment in which forest planners, managers, and policymakers operate today is one of rapid, complex, and turbulent change. The broad social, economic, technological, and political contexts for forestry are constantly changing and the pace of change is accelerating (Steffen et al. 2015). The internal environment for forestry is also characterized by rapid and often surprising change, as new developments and emerging issues within the field continually appear and pose challenges for decisionmakers. To be effective in these changing internal and external contexts, forestry...

The USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station,s Strategic Foresight Group partnered with the University of Houston Foresight program to design and implement a horizon scanning system for the agency. The guiding question for the project was: What emerging issues might impact forests, forestry, and the Forest Service in the future? The University of Houston's "Framework Foresight" approach provided the conceptual foundation for this horizon scanning system. Framing of the topic is described, including creation of a domain map, and identifying the geographic focus, timeframe, and...

The Forest Futures Horizon Scanning project depends on volunteer scanners, who often have no experience with scanning. Therefore, it was important to find ways to help volunteers become productive scanners quickly and effectively. This paper describes a method that was developed for identifying a list of useful and relevant scanning sources for the forest futures domain. The table of scanning sources produced by this research is a valuable first step to help new scanners begin to identify signals of change related to forest futures.

A vital step in any ongoing horizon scanning process is periodically analyzing the growing database of scanning hits to identify emerging issues, provide insight into possible implications of these issues, and generate foresight. This paper is a preliminary and partial effort to "connect the dots" in the Forest Futures Horizon Scanning system. We examine the descriptive tags associated with each scanning hit as a way to characterize the database, and then describe several themes that have emerged from multiple scanning hits.

A key purpose of the Forest Futures Horizon Scanning system is to identify weak signals of potential future change and emerging issues for the USDA Forest Service and its stakeholders. An understanding of current issues facing the agency is a prerequisite for identifying weak signals and emerging issues. Scanners who work for the Forest Service generally have this understanding, but scanners from outside typically have little or no familiarity with current agency issues. This paper briefly describes an effort to develop a list of current issues for the Forest Service to be used by scanners...