- All right, I want to welcome everyone
to our webinar about the new online tool that was developed
called Tracking Shifts in Disturbance Regimes.
And Pia Ruisi-Besares will start us off.
- Thanks.
Hi, everyone, thank you so much for coming.
I am Pia, I'm the project manager
for the Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative
and I'm really excited to tell you about
the newest release of our webtool,
Tracking Shifts in Disturbance Regimes.
So I will introduce the project
and the process that went into the work
and then I'm actually gonna split the talk with Jim Duncan,
our director who's here,
and he'll share with you the analysis and the trends.
And then at the very end,
we'll walk through the webtool live,
or I will walk the webtool
just to sort of show you how it works.
And hopefully we'll have plenty of time for questions
at the end as well.
So to start at the very beginning
in case you're not familiar with us,
the Forest Ecosystem Monitoring Cooperative
is a collaborative organization,
and we work with federal agencies, state agencies,
and the University of Vermont
and we synthesize trends in forest ecosystem health
across the region.
And so to us the region includes New England
and the state of New York.
And in order to provide the services,
the FEMC has a regional committee of cooperative members
from different disciplines and different states
who come together annually and discuss relevant questions
about forest ecosystems that need to be addressed
across administrative boundaries,
and then the FEMC carries this out.
And if you know us,
you'll know that a lot of our projects
are sort of web-based
because we have a really strong web development team
for an ecological organization.
So hopefully you're familiar with some of our work.
And so this past fiscal year,
there were two projects that we worked on.
One was the Climate Indicators Project
that I gave a talk on a couple of weeks ago,
and you can see that webinar information
on YouTube if you're interested.
And then the project I'll be talking about today
is our Tracking Shifts in Disturbance Regimes Project.
So as many of you probably know,
shifts and disturbance patterns across the Northeast
are of increasing concern
because as climate change continues to change,
there'll be impacts to our forests.
So this project came from that recognized need
to understand the shifts historically,
to predict them to the future
and then to use whatever information comes from that
to hopefully implement adaptive management strategies
in Northeastern forests
to sort of mitigate some of those impacts.
So in particular, this project focuses on,
changes in the patterns of frequency, severity and extent
of disturbance events across the region
and hopes to look at sort of the cascading impacts
of forest ecosystems and human communities
as the project progresses over time.
So the goal of the project is not really
to reinvent the wheel on this.
We know that there's
a lot of disturbance work out there already,
and there have been disturbance projects
that have analyzed individual outcomes
and individual disturbance types,
so what we're trying to focus on here
is consolidating that information into one place
and sort of look at the current state of disturbance
in Northeastern forests
and provide a place for users to come and look at trends
and access data that can be used for further exploration.
So to dive in a little bit more so we're on the same page,
I just wanted to define what we're talking about
when we say disturbance and disturbance regimes.
So for this project, we're defining disturbance
as a biotic or abiotic event that causes changes to,
or disrupts the function of forest ecosystems
and/or the services that they provide.
And then when we're talking about a disturbance regime,
it's the pattern of a given disturbance event
and its impacts.
And so that definition,
I think, is used in other places as well,
but that's how we have shaped it for our project here.
And it's important to understand these patterns,
as I was saying, because the historical changes
will show us possible predictions for the future,
which can then allow us to explore
some of our resilience strategies that forests need
as they are assaulted with more and more disturbances.
And so one of the ways we can do this is through monitoring,
and monitoring allows us to see baselines
and look back into the past
and also to see how things are changing into the future.
So in order to sort of make this project manageable,
since there are so many possible types
of disturbance and impacts,
we had three major driving questions
that sort of helped develop the scope of the work.
And so these questions are,
what are the key drivers and responses to disturbance?
So with so many options, what should we focus on right now
to best reflect changes in the Northeast
and that's manageable for us to look at
and it has accessible data for us to start to analyze?
And then we also wanted to make sure that we covered
what the historical and anticipated shifts and trends are
and specifically how there're changes
in extent, severity and frequency of disturbance events,
and I'll talk about that a little bit more later on
but those are sort of the three metrics
that we were looking at as we thought about change.
And then finally, we wanted to make sure
that we had a database that aggregated this information
so it could be explored
and that these specific drivers or disturbances
could be looked at in a different way.
And so those were the sort of the three main goals
that we kept in mind
as we moved forward through the project.
And so with that information in mind, we had three inputs,
sorry, outputs at the end of our project.
One is to have a filterable database,
and so this is to quickly find historical data sets
related to specific disturbance drivers and responses
so that you could easily find that information.
The second and probably the most time intensive component
was the trend analysis section.
To see an overview of changes in regime
by region and by state.
So it's a variety of graphs, overlaid
and you'll get to see those, that if possible,
we would look at extent, severity and frequency
depending on the dataset.
And then finally the third output was a visual mapping tool
that helps to identify where monitoring is occurring
and where there are gaps.
And this part is always under constant development
so we look forward to hearing about
monitoring projects that can be added to this.
So I will just briefly give
some more information about the process of how we did this
to give a little more background
and then I will define some of our terms
and then you can see the analysis that we worked through.
So I think a great place to start
is to acknowledge our advisory committee.
So I mentioned in the beginning
that we have a large steering committee
that helps identify our projects,
excuse me, we also often have smaller committees,
they're involved in individual projects that we work on
that are a collaboration of different experts
from across the region
that bring different things to the table,
and so for this project we have expertise in various fields
including fire dynamics, forest ecology,
pests and pathogens specialists
and freshwater and geomorphological dynamic specialists.
So we are getting information
from people outside of our organization
and we're hoping that that makes us
a more comprehensive tool that it can be used by others
who have more expertise in these various fields.
So we got this committee together and they helped us
to guide the project.
So once we had our steering committee,
topic decision from our larger committee,
we then started our process of developing the project
over about two years.
It started with the cooperative survey
and an initial literature review that we did as FEMC staff
and then we had an initial meeting
with our advisory committee members
where we got together and showed them what we had found.
And in that group, we sort of had a working meeting
where we determined the critical disturbance types
that we're gonna look at
and within that, we found that they were actually
a difference between disturbance types
and they were drivers and responses
and I'll talk about that a little bit more later
but that was all determined by our advisory committee group.
After we made that determination,
we started collecting data sets,
we designed an information portal
and we met again with our advisory committee
to show them the data sets that we were planning to use
for our trend analysis, to kind of get the okay
and work through any of the details with others.
And from there we started the analysis process
and created a web portal.
And finally, before we were done,
we had a final review with the advisory committee
who we also have met with in different individual meetings
across the time of the project.
But they reviewed our final analysis and interpretation
and then we finished up our technical report
and released our webtool, so that's where we are today.
So it's a long process with a lot of help from other people.
All right.
So I wanted to just mention
the difference between drivers and responses
and some of our metrics
and show you what they are before we look at them.
As we work through the various types of disturbances
in the project,
we realized that there were areas of interest
that could be categorized into two types of disturbance
as we're kind of calling it.
Disturbance drivers and disturbance responses.
So we'll be spending most of the time
looking at drivers in this project
and that's what we do our analysis on
but I just wanted to take a minute
to clarify our definitions
because they show up differently
on the website and the tool.
So in this project, we're calling a disturbance driver,
an agent that causes disturbance to occur.
And in this project they're mostly abiotic
and climate related and these are the aspects
that we have trend analysis available for,
most of which allow us
to look at extent severity and frequency.
Our disturbance responses are key systems within forests
that change following forest disturbance.
And these systems can be used as indicators
so they show occurrence and severity
in the implications of a disturbance event,
but they're not the actual driver of the event.
And they're important because studying their dynamics
can help to understand the impacts of disturbance regimes
and how they might be changing.
However, the trend analysis are unavailable right now
because they're a little bit muddier
and harder to parse out the cause and effect.
So we have information about these
and they are very important to understand,
but we haven't looked at
their historical trends at this time.
So the big reveal, our selected drivers and responses
for the project are here
and you can learn more about them
on the website in particular,
I won't have time to walk through why we selected each one,
but I can say that these were sort of all drivers
that are important to the region
and also had large enough data sets
that we could spend time with pulling out information
over the years.
And so we have extreme weather,
which includes flooding and high winds.
We have our pest category,
which we divided into advancing invasives,
established invasives and native pests.
We also have fire and we have droughts.
And again, we recognize that this is not
inclusive of every type of important driver.
These are just the ones we sort of had time to dive into
for the first version of this project.
And then our responses
that we were able to aggregate information for
were stream macroinvertebrates,
invasive plants and cold water fisheries.
So these are three systems
or communities that are impacted very clearly
by disturbance events.
There's a lot of research
on these systems being indications of disturbance.
And so we've compiled information about those on the site
and given a little bit more information.
And then finally, before Jim jumps in
with the analysis of our drivers,
I just wanted to revisit some quick vocabulary
from the beginning to sort of frame the analysis.
So as I mentioned earlier,
we really focused on extent, severity and frequency
as our metrics of change,
and that's what our trends will be divided into.
And so just to make sure we're all on the same page,
extent is thinking about
is the amount of area affected changing?
Are disturbance regimes happening in more places?
Basically.
The severity, so, is severity of the impact
of disturbance changing?
Are disturbance lasting longer?
Are they happening with more intensity?
That would sort of all be encompassed
in the severity category
and then finally frequency,
are disturbance events happening more often?
So have occurrences increased, decreased, stayed the same?
Those are sort of the main metrics that we're using
that Jim will show us more.
So I'm gonna stop sharing and let Jim take over.
- Thanks Pia and as I pull this up here,
let's make sure we're looking good there.
Can you see my presentation screen?
Yes, great.
So, thank you for setting that up
and my goal here is to walk through some of the drivers
and kind of give a high-level overview
of what we've found in terms of trends
and then where there are some interesting pieces,
we'll kind of dive into those a little bit more.
So we're gonna kind of cover a lot of ground
and a lot of depth,
but just to wait to try and show
what you can use this tool for in terms of summary
and thinking about these different disturbance drivers
and how we kind of came to some findings from this project.
So first we'll talk about high winds.
High wind is defined
as anything greater than 55 miles an hour
based on established scales.
We use some five second fastest wind speed data from NOAA,
which covers from 2001 to 2020,
and gives us over 73 stations with 1800 events.
And these are stations that have consistent reporting
across the time,
so we can do that kind of temporal trend analysis.
So looking at our key questions
around frequency, extent and severity,
we can ask, are high winds becoming more frequent?
Based on this analysis, no, they're not.
Are they happening in more places,
letting up more stations across the region?
Yes, we are seeing regionally that there are increases
in high wind events, which can topple trees
or cause significant damage to forests
in both the regional sense and in the states shown.
Are they getting more severe?
Are we having more higher wind events,
the maximum wind speed going up?
No, they're getting less severe over time.
And we see that pretty consistently across the board.
So the first one becoming more frequent,
we just don't have a statistical significance
in more often occurrence of high winds,
but these other two I'll dive into a little bit more.
So looking at high wind events happening
in more than one place, more places over time,
the number of stations that are reporting what event
is going up statistically over the last 20 years.
So we do see this pattern and this pattern holds
in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island.
Are high wind events getting more severe?
For this we looked at both
the maximum wind speed on average per year,
as well as the number of events in the 95th percentile
for the entire year.
So looking at that first one, average max wind speed,
there's definitely a statistically significant decrease
in that metric over time.
The number of events in the 95th percentile,
it's a bit skewed
because of the presence of Hurricane Katrina in the record.
So we do see a drop,
but the signal is perhaps slightly driven
by that large event.
So no high wind events are not getting more severe
based on these metrics,
and we are seeing this hole
pretty much across the entire region
with the exception of Vermont.
Switching over to flooding,
we define flooding as gauge levels above flood stage,
which is defined by USGS and NOAA.
And we combined these two data sets
to pull out records from gauges
that have instantaneous stream levels
and the a flood event database from NOAA.
So it allows us to correlate
the heights of those stream gauges
with the flood events that are recorded.
And then we can look at if those flood events
are getting more severe.
There are, if you look into the tool,
there's a real detailed breakdown
by different severities of flood category.
But here today, I'll just talk about general patterns.
Combining these data sets,
we get 12 years of data at 179 stations
with consistent records.
So looking at the trends,
across the board,
we do not have any significant trends at the regional scale,
nor really at the state of scale.
There's a couple of pieces,
but it's really not a clear picture
of increasing or decreasing
in frequency, extent or severity
for flooding based on these categories for this data set.
And that's not to say there aren't localized patterns
that will be missed
in this kind of regional and state level analysis,
but given our charts
to kinda look across the region
and see if we see these shifts,
we're not seeing it in flooding.
Moving on to fire.
This is somewhat of a less common topic in the Northeast
in terms of forest disturbance,
especially when we look at the national conversation
around fire and our forests,
but we did wanna examine this one
'cause it's increasing interest,
especially as climate change starts to shift patterns
of a suitable species
and disturbance machines across our landscape.
So we looked at a research grade database
called the Fire Program Analysis by our current database,
which as a way of integrating fire reports
from across the region.
And we looked at any fire with a reported acreage
between 1992 and 2018, which is the extent of this data set.
And that leads to over 125,000 fires
that we had data to analyze.
So pretty robust data source
that said there is a lot of data from New York
as you can see in the map,
there's a concentration of fire reporting
in areas that have a longer history of fire occurrence
and fire management.
So are fires becoming more frequent?
Are we having more per year?
Yes, we do see that occurrences are going up
in this data set both regionally and in some states.
Are they burning more overall area?
And this is an interesting one, no,
but we are seeing a decrease in the average size of fires.
So they're not burning more area,
but maybe each individual fire is taking a little less area.
And are they burning more area at once?
Is our fire size going up?
No. And when I say no,
we just don't see any significant change
at the regional level,
at the state level, we do see some interesting results.
So, are fires becoming more frequent?
We use the metric of the number of fires reported.
You can see that over time, this is trending upwards,
at least in the record that we have.
And this a statistically significant increase holds
both regionally and in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York,
and in somewhat interestingly in Vermont.
Are fires burning more overall area?
I'll start out by saying that general question,
no, it's unclear.
We don't see a trend
in the size of individual fires over time,
but we do see this a statistically significant decrease
in average fire size,
whether this is a real signal
or a result of more smaller fires
being reported into the database as an open question.
But this decrease in average area
does hold across these states,
Connecticut, Maine, New York, and Vermont.
Looking next at drought, we used the US drought monitor,
and probably many of you are familiar
with the drought monitor in some way or another.
It is a great resource
for monitoring ongoing drought conditions across the state.
And drought can have numerous ways
of impacting forest ecosystems
from stressing trees to lowering flows,
to limiting groundwater recharged.
So the ways that this can affect the ecosystem
are pretty broad,
but it's certainly an important consideration.
The drought monitor provides drought conditions
in a number of drought status levels.
And we looked at each of those in the tool
and in the report.
And since it's a spatially contiguous data set
that's updated on a regular basis throughout the year,
we're kind of working with a continuous data source
between 2000 and 2020.
For the purposes of this webinar is looking broadly at,
do we see any trends in overall drought through the record.
Are droughts becoming more frequent?
There's no sign of that.
But when we looked at some of the categories
specifically at abnormally dry conditions,
we're seeing Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont
showing a slight increase in the length
of those dry conditions.
Are droughts affecting more area
and becoming more widespread across the region? No.
No, we don't see a signal in that
in any of the categories or overall.
And are they're becoming more severe?
In other words, are droughts going from abnormally dry
and moderate drought into the severe
and extreme drought categories.
And again, from the state of set,
we don't see statistical evidence that that's happening.
I did wanna show,
this is a little bit of a complicated chart to interpret,
but essentially it just shows the total number of weeks
and abnormally dry conditions for Massachusetts,
Vermont and Connecticut over the record.
And there is an overall increase
in these states reporting places
that are in these conditions.
So the trend lines are statistically significant.
So potentially we're having more time
spent in drought conditions in these three states,
but this is a fairly limited category
and there are other ways of thinking about it
that might be worth exploring,
but generally the patterns and droughts are not clear.
The next category,
I'm gonna talk about a little bit differently
because of the way that these disturbance drivers operate
and the nature of the data source.
So looking at pests and pathogens,
these are insects diseases that affect tree canopies
and eventually tree health.
We looked at a data source, which is the aerial detection,
insect disease surveys.
They're primarily flown by state forestry agencies
and US forest service FEMC has done some work
to pull together historical data for this purpose.
And we looked at damage,
both the total area defoliated or killed
and then also the share of damage that's mortality
or killing of the trees from an agent.
And we have a data set that nominally spans 1918 to 2020.
There's some disparities in coverage
for states in the earlier part of the record.
We know we have pretty consistent coverage
across states from 1997 onward,
but we did look at the entire record for this project
of over 130,000 polygons of mapped damage on the landscape.
But lumping all these together wouldn't totally make sense,
so we looked at three types of pests,
those that are native and endemic pests,
such as forest tent caterpillar,
they've been here and been established in these systems.
The systems has evolved with these pests as part of them.
We looked at established invasives
or invasives that have been here
and introduced for a long time.
And so taking on a role in that ecosystem
with a longer record,
and then we also looked at advancing invasives
are those that are introduced,
by maybe moving into the region
or throughout the region in a progression.
So I'm not gonna go into the same level of detail
for each of these, but instead just talk about
some notable trends that we see in those key,
somewhat like indicator pests
that have a significant presence in the region.
The first is a forest tent caterpillar.
We do see a decreasing extent.
However, I would suspect
that this is largely driven by
an early large event in New York,
but overall, even in the later time periods
that a decreasing trend is as apparent.
So we're not seeing as much area defoliated
by a forest tent caterpillar as we were previously.
Looking at spruce budworm,
which is another endemic pest in the region
that has an outbreak cycle,
it does operate on a fairly long cycle.
And so seeing trends in extent is challenging,
but based on the data
that is in the area of detection surveys,
that overall area damage is going down.
And I'll note that in the native pest category,
we really didn't see any reportable trends
around severity or around frequency.
And again, because these are outbreak cycle pests,
frequency has different meaning.
There is some indication that the period
between these might be lessening,
but it's not a significant change
looking at established invasives.
So these are ones that have been introduced
and been around for awhile.
The first step is lymantria dispar,
formerly known as gypsy moth,
it is showing an increasing overall mortality
and an increasing share of damage that's mortality,
and anyone who has followed the trends in this pest
for the last little bit,
know about the struggles in Southern New England,
combining lymantria dispar
and drought conditions and multi-year outbreaks
and the increase that we've seen in the Northern
half of the region in the last couple of years.
So, a statistically significant increase in mortality,
both in New Hampshire and Massachusetts,
as well as the regional scale.
Another pest that has been here for a long time
and is of particular concern in Maine is the browntail moth.
And we are seeing an increase in the overall extent
of that pest damage to trees in Maine to the record.
And you can see is quite a significant increase
in the last few years.
Turning to advancing invasives.
We don't have enough data on these to report trends.
So we're really looking at this more as a baseline.
These are pests of concern
that we know will be important to understand
their disturbance dynamics going forward,
but we just don't have the information
needed to analyze trends over time.
So looking at emerald ash borer,
this is a fairly new introduction to our region.
It's been in New York for awhile.
Southern new England has dealt with it.
It's moving it's way through Maine
and New Hampshire and Vermont right now.
So a significant increase in observable damage from the air.
And it's a reminder that this is,
has to be visible from a plane.
So we are seeing that increase at uptake in acreage
affected by EAB.
Hemlock woolly adelgid has a really strong control
on its populations from winter temperatures.
So the cycles you see in acres damaged
really kind of varies with the winter
and southern pine beetle
is limited almost exclusively to New York
and just doesn't have much of a presence in the region,
but there is an initial record of damage,
and as this pest moves in,
this is something that can be updated and examined.
So overall,
we just don't have enough observations in the region
to see trends of this data source,
but it does provide a baseline
for thinking about how we would monitor
advancing invasives as they move through the region.
So I know I covered a lot,
but that's a quick overview of the snapshots,
these trend information graphs,
and the findings are available in the technical report
and website that Pia will dive into next.
- Hi, I'm gonna shift this over to the websites.
And I just wanted to acknowledge
that I saw questions in the chat and we will get to those.
So is everyone seeing this screen?
Yes. Okay, thank you.
So I would spend a little bit of time
just walking through the tool
and I very much encourage you to look at it
on your own afterward if you have an interest,
because it will be quick,
but we're always available to answer your questions.
but this is the sort of pop-up at the front of the website
and I left it up because I just really wanted to emphasize
that this is sort of the first version of this website.
So it is complete for its first iteration,
but we know that there are probably
a lot of monitoring efforts that we could add,
or there might be comments that folks have for feedback.
So if you'd like to share that with us,
we would love to hear,
and you can do that right here
through our contact information.
You can share protocols, et cetera.
And then we also have another tool
that is related to this information
called The Northeastern Forest Health Atlas
and you can learn more about that here as well.
So if you go to the website,
there's sort of a couple of different ways
to interact with it.
And I'll start as if you're someone
who hasn't decided what you wanna learn about yet.
So if you come to the page,
you can kind of see a brief introduction
about what's the purpose and what's going on here.
And you can see the disturbances in their broader categories
that we've selected and also their responses.
And from this page,
you could explore any sub categories that are related.
So if you're interested in extreme weather,
you can click View,
and you'll be taken to sort of a shorter description
of the categories that are within this larger category,
and at the moment,
there's just the drivers that we showed earlier.
But the hope is that there'll be more to add in the future.
So this intermediate page will be helpful.
I will go back to the homepage really quickly, too,
just to show you that you can look through all of these
and find the same sort of information.
And you can also toggle up here to go back and forth.
The same information is located here in a driver,
in the response section.
So if you've already visited the page
and you know what you wanna look at,
you can get to the same information here.
These are all of the drivers, and these are our responses.
I'm gonna take us now into one of the, we'll do floods.
So on the flood page,
you'll see more of the trend analysis information
that Jim walked through,
but you have a lot more ability to click and select
different types of information.
So all of them sort of start with the whole region selected,
which is what we talked about earlier,
but you can also see individual state information
that will pop up here
and you can remove regional information as well.
And if you toggle over the different trends,
I'm sorry, the different trend lines on the graphs,
you can see more detailed information as well,
and on the side here,
you can also download any of this information
that you're interested in.
For a quick overview,
you have your disturbance trend summary analysis here,
and your highlights as well.
And then as you scroll down,
you can see additional resources.
And I'm sorry, I should have shown you that.
There are several tabs for each of these charts,
because it was easier to look at
the different metrics individually.
So this is frequency.
If there are all of them,
you can look at extent separately and severity as well.
If possible, there's also location information.
I think that there are for all of these data sets
that we are sharing now,
and this is the actual stations where the data was recorded.
So you can see that information as well.
So these additional resources are monitoring efforts
that are related,
but were not included in the trend analysis.
I think that's important to understand.
So the trend analysis
use just the data sets that Jim highlighted.
And that is because,
although this other information is interesting,
it might not have had enough breadth,
that might not have went, had enough historical data,
or it may have only been in one small plot over time.
So that information is here and you can look at it
if you'd like to,
it just isn't currently added to the analysis.
And what you can see is that
if there are any related data products,
you can also grab them here.
And I'm gonna show you this in a different way
in just a minute.
So I'm gonna take us back to the homepage.
If you've moved, oh, here we go.
Another way you can use the tool,
as if you've already decided what you wanna look at
in terms of,
if you wanna look at a regional,
from a regional perspective, I'm sorry,
you can go to our monitoring resources pages,
and this shows that the same type of information
about where the monitoring efforts are located
and the studies that are related,
it's the same information
that's in that additional resources section.
So you can click here on View,
or you could also go to the monitoring and resources tab,
which will take you here.
So as you can see, it's a similar type of information,
you have this tabular view
where you can see the data programs
at the monitoring efforts,
you can filter by the state, the subtype
so those are our drivers again, or our responses
and you can look at the years and the data products.
You can also see this in a map version.
So all of the different monitoring efforts
are here on the map
and right now they aren't filtered in any way
so everything is present,
but you can filter here and various dropdown menus
right now they're all highlighted,
but you could select various different options,
depending on what you're looking for.
You can categorized by the years.
And you can also search for the name of,
by keyword up here in the top
if you know a specific study,
or if you have an area of interest
that you think might show up like a region, for example.
You click into the states and you wanna see
sort of all of the different categories within that state.
If you haven't filtered anything, this is what you will see.
If you filtered for just pests and pathogens and fire,
that's all we'll come up with.
But these are all the studies divided into those categories,
and you can click in further
and see the names of each study that's related.
If you decide you wanna look
at one of these studies in particular,
you can click and you get the separate pop-up video, modal,
sorry,
a separate pop-up modal
that will then show you any more specific location
information about where the monitoring effort is happening.
This one doesn't have that.
And a lot of them at this time haven't been parsed out yet,
but sometimes they will have plot locations
and if that's available, it will be here.
You can also learn more about the study.
You can get linked to the study itself,
and then if there's any associated datasets,
you can find them here
and you can be taken in a separate page
to that information as well.
So these studies, as I said,
they're not included in the trend analysis,
but they still have very important information
and we hope that if it's all aggregated in one place,
that people can find that information
and they can do their own trend analysis
or build on a project
and that's sort of the goal of this section.
The last thing I wanted to show,
I know I'm running out of time
and I know there are questions,
but I wanted to show our responses a little bit
because I haven't spent very much time talking about that.
I'll take us to stream macroinvertebrates.
There's three individual pages
for the disturbance responses.
And as I said, there's no analysis for these
because the data sets aren't quite as clear,
but there is information about these.
You can find additional resources that hopefully
as people have recommendations to this will grow.
These are not monitoring efforts,
these are just resources about stream macroinvertebrates
or places where you can participate
in citizen science, et cetera,
but then you have a direct already pre-filtered view
of monitoring efforts related to this response.
So it works the same way.
You can click in here and see those pop up menus
and learn more about studies.
Oh, I clicked on the highlighted study.
So that's great, it takes you,
it rotates every month
and you can see a different highlighted report,
but that information is also reflected here in this table.
And so you can sort through this table
and find information about macro invertebrates
and different studies that are ongoing.
I think that's all I'm gonna show today.
I do wanna take a minute to look at pests and pathogens,
'cause it's a little bit different.
So if you go into pests or pathogens,
you can see that there's these three different sections.
And within the pests and pathogens disturbance driver page,
there are some slightly different graphics.
So of course the analysis were done
in a way that is appropriate with the data,
but there are multiple different pests
within each of these categories.
So you have southern pine beetle,
to look at hemlock woolly adelgid,
you have to click the next link and emerald ash borer.
And there are separate charts for all of these.
And again, you can look at the region,
you can look at the states
and you'll see with pests and pathogens,
and we don't have frequency
because that was something that particular metric
didn't correlate with the type of information
or it didn't work with the type of information we had.
There's a lot to show here,
so I'm actually gonna pause and ask if Emma or Jim
had anything they would like me to highlight
while I'm here.
- Specifically,
there was a question about where Southern pine beetle
is occurring in the region right now,
if you would be able to click back to that
and showed location tab,
I think that's a nice way to quickly get a picture
of the location and the number of times
that that has been observed.
So yes, it aspires to be confined to long island,
there have been detections in more Northern counties,
but it's a largely a pitch pine barren impact
because of the role of fire and fire suppression
allowing the SPB to flourish.
So I just wanted to show that you can get this data
through this location view,
and this is available for most of the maps as well.
So that's available and like Pia you said,
there's the Northeastern Forest Health Atlas,
which also has this data viewable there.
- Great. Thank you.
So I'm just scrolling in, I will move us out of here,
but I did wanna show that any additional information
that you would like to see about these projects
are found in our about tabs.
And this is a place
where you can read our technical report as well.
So if you really wanna know
about the sort of minutia of the analysis,
or if you want to find more of our reference material
it's in here.
So please take a look at our technical report,
it was quite the effort.
Okay.
- Are we ready to start?
- Sorry, I'm trying to get back to the,
I have like two more slides. - Oh, okay.
- And they are ready
so let me just get back to that screen share.
Okay. Are you seeing that?
Great. Thank you.
Sorry for the pause.
So thank you for bearing with me through that webtool.
I know it's really fast.
I'd love to spend more time looking at it
and there's lots to see.
So please do contact any of us
if you'd like to hear or ask questions at the end
would be a great time to talk about it,
but I just wanted to recap our final outputs
for the project,
just to sort of remind everyone what we've done here.
So there's the technical report
that I just showed you also
that has a more detailed analysis of methodologies
and any next steps and recommendations
can be found in there.
We have the webtool,
which has the regime trend analysis for the seven drivers,
and then also the additional monitoring resources
that we walked through.
And then there are the response pages as well,
which are more informational at this time.
And we hope that this project will be built on.
And so we have some next steps that we've identified here.
Oops, yeah.
So currently the web portal only allows users
to see the data and the trend visualizations at one time,
so just one disturbance at a time.
In the future, we're hoping that we can focus on
providing a customizable chart component
that would allow viewers to visualize the data
with multiple disturbances at once.
And this would provide a more complex illustration
of disturbance in the region and also allow users
to investigate the relationship between disturbance trends.
And we've heard that this is an interest
so we are also excited about the potential for that.
The web portal trend analysis for each of the drivers
and some of the preliminary interpretation shows that,
sorry, excuse me, shows the implication of the trends.
However, the analysis would be really enriched
if we included expert interpretation.
So what we're hoping
is that folks will wanna look at some of the data
and provide some more inputs
that we can make some management recommendations
based on what we've found.
And then we we're hoping that,
oops, I'm sorry,
that future research
will inform how to connect drivers and responses.
So right now they're not connected,
but there's a lot of evidence already
that show that there are kind of correlations
between the types of information.
So we're hoping that that will be eliminated.
And then finally,
we hope that there will be more information added from folks
so that it can fill in any gaps that we have
in our monitoring and be able to share information
across the region.
So thank you so much.
I just wanna acknowledge our committee members
who helped with our project as well as our funding sources
and also our staff, particularly Emma Tait
who's here as well,
who did a lot of our trend analysis and Jen Pontius.
So thank you all so much for coming
and we can take questions now, if you have any.
I'm gonna stop screen sharing.
- Great. Thank you both.
And I was just gonna start,
we could ask some of the questions
that were put into the chat earlier on in the conversation
just so that we don't lose those.
One question about fire is,
are there more fires present in the Adirondack region,
Catskills or Western New York?
- So I was looking at the fire occurrence,
just the number of fires reported in those regions,
it's definitely the lower Hudson valley
and the Catskills region,
as well as some pockets of Western New York
that report more fires over the course of the dataset.
But we didn't do a sub state.
We didn't look at different regions within the state
in terms of trends or differences.
So that's just an observation based on the existing data.
And if you were to click on the location tab
in the fire section on the website,
you can see the graphic that I showed during the slide.
- And then there was a question also
about harmful algal blooms.
And if that is something that could be,
included in measuring or collecting data
about blooms and water quality
and how that might impact native and non-native species.
- I can take a stab at that Pia,
feel free to correct me if I'm wrong,
but, in general we didn't look at harmful algal blooms
because they're somewhat outside the systems
that we were trying to look at,
specifically forested systems.
Harmful algal blooms may be resulting from
disturbance and Upland watersheds,
but would be more of a response.
So, it was kind of outside of the scope of this project.
- Does anyone else have any other questions
or are there anything else that you want us
to look at more closely on the website itself
or anything that anyone would like to see?
Now is your chance to,
we'd like to open this up for questions and discussion.
- I wanted to respond to one question that Ronan posted
in the chat that we kind of touched on in the chat
about southern pine beetle in particular,
some questions to that that have been answered there,
but there was one that you asked around
is that also location
where there's abundance of invasive species
from warmer temperatures.
And I think that's a good thing to think about
when we have looked at our region as a monitoring hole,
we look to the southern region
for where we can kind of learn from.
They're often the first to receive pests
from a warming climate as they moved northward
for more suitable habitat into our region.
And certainly something like hemlock woolly adelgid,
which has this winter control is something that we'll see
becoming more prevalent and region wide as a winters warm,
and we don't get those killing temperatures.
And so I think thinking about Connecticut
and southern New York as kind of the Harbinger's
of what the rest of New England and New York might face,
is certainly something that we should keep an eye on.
And then I'll answer your other question, Ronan, about,
are southern pine beetles bursts for New York
than say, Emerald Ash borer or spotted lanternfly?
It really is a value question.
I think a spotted lantern fly receives a lot of,
has a lot of concern
because it also is a agricultural fruit tree pest.
And so the economic damage potential
from that pest on fruit trees and vineyards
is gonna be a significant concern.
Emerald ash borer is very effective at killing trees
and there are ash trees spread throughout
the Northern forest and in New York.
So that's gonna be a concern for a different reason.
Also, we have a lot of street trees
or used to have a lot of street trees
that are now being removed by emerald ash borer
or by municipalities.
Looking at Southern pine beetle,
it tends to be somewhat confined
to the southern New York area right now
because of where there are pitch pine
and fire adapted ecosystem.
So it depends on the system
and kind of what value you're speaking of
when thinking about what's worse.
- I see, there's another few questions that have come in.
"Do you know of any long-term data on deer herbivory
as a driver of forest disturbance?"
- I'll take that one
because I've been thinking about it a lot.
So our next upcoming regional project
is about ungulate browse
and impact assessment of browse herbivory,
so we are starting to look through that information.
There was the region portal,
which was also created several years ago with FEMC
and I can put that in the chat
where we started to look at some of those studies
and aggregate them.
So there's some information there,
but we're hoping to have a lot more information
about that by the end of the year.
So, yes, I think it's very important,
but we haven't included that yet.
- And then another question,
"Is it possible to see the different disturbances all
on the same location map?"
- No.
Not currently.
So as I was sort of summing up in the next steps,
which got a little distracting,
'cause all of my screens started getting really wonky,
but right now you can't see them.
And it's a little bit challenging
because the data sets are very different.
And so to be able to put them together,
we'd have to really work with the data
and try to get it all established.
And we wanted to do that originally,
but we had some roadblocks,
but I think that that could be very interesting.
And so the solution that we're moving towards
is to have at least all of the charts put together,
all the disturbance trends,
even if you can't see the locations
of all of the information.
Jim, do you wanna clarify anything that I just said
or does that sound right?
- No, that's all right.
I think the only addition I would say
is that the Forest Health Atlas
does allow you to see when those disturbances
have caused tree mortality or damage.
So you can look at wind damage and flooding damage
and drought damage if it shows up in those aerial surveys.
And I think as you know, Katie,
those are not ubiquitous,
like a reliable source for all types of damage.
But if there's been a significant wind event
that caused blow down or damage,
it'll show up in that aerial detection survey data,
and that's not the Forest Health Atlas,
but what we can't do right now is say,
show me all the wind stations that lit up
in the last 10 years
across the landscape with high wind events.
That's not currently doable.
It doesn't mean it couldn't be done,
it's just not them with this current tool.
And I'll drop the Forest Health Atlas
link in the chat too if folks aren't familiar with that.
- Elissa, I think you're muted.
- Oops.
I was just saying that I just dropped in the region tool
that Pia mentioned as well for the deer and ungulate browse
that there's some information in there.
And then let's see another question,
"Will a high-level overview be available
on the website or updated as data becomes available?
- I think I have a follow-up question.
Do you mean beyond the regional trend analysis or.
- [Logan] Yeah, this is a Logan.
I appreciated Jim's kind of overview
in how succinctly you was put together
and I was just wondering if I can find that anywhere
on the website kind of upfront.
- I think right now the information
is mostly in the technical report
and on the charts on the site,
is there somewhere else that I'm missing?
No. - No, not in that format,
but we certainly could,
if that is a useful way of representing this information
for someone like you in your work
or in understanding or looking at these,
I think we certainly could provide that those images
and then link back to the underlying data
if you want it to go deeper.
- Yeah. I guess I'd also add that we have been asked
to talk about some of these,
of our tools with specific state partnership groups.
And I'm excited about that
because it gives us a little bit more time
to look at state specific data and drill down
into that and present that information.
We couldn't really cover that in this webinar,
but if there is ever an interest to hear specifically
about state data, we can look at that more closely too
and in shorter, more directed meetings.
- And Pia, would it be all right
if I added one more comment on Logan's question.
- Yeah.
- You asked about when it's updated,
and I think that's an important question for this tool.
We, I think we as a staff and some of our partners
certainly see value in this
as an ongoing resource for the region.
We're very much in the phase of seeing if that's true.
So if this is something that you do want to see updated,
letting us know would be helpful
because as we talk with our governing committees
and our partners,
and they're kind of directing the work for the future,
knowing if this is something we should update would be good.
These data sets that we used are regularly updated sources
with a long, like a, a bit of institutional support.
So that one of the reasons we chose those data sets
is so that we can have that ability to monitor it
on an ongoing basis and look for change.
There's certainly time that is needed,
but it's a lot less to keep it updated
than it was to build it.
So if this is a value, do let us know
so we can take that back to our committees
and prioritize that for future work.
- Great. Thank you.
I think that we're coming up on time here.
And so I wanna thank everyone for joining us today.
I do have a quick survey that I just put in the chat,
if you wouldn't mind completing that,
it'll take you a minute.
And I also wanted to share,
I think something that Pia mentioned earlier was,
a recording from our climate indicators webinar,
and that can be found on the UVM streaming website
and we will be making a recording
of this webinar available as well.
So you can come back and watch again.
All right.
- Well thank you, Elissa. - Thank you.
- Thanks everybody.
- Thank you. - Thanks everyone.
- And then please feel free to contact me
if you have any questions or if you wanna share any data.
Someone contacted me after my last webinar
I was really excited, so please reach out.
Thanks.