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Threat Interactions

Interaction Function: noun
Date: 1832
def: mutual or reciprocal action or influence

It is becoming increasingly apparent that multiple, interacting disturbances combined with land use and climate change are affecting the structure and function of wildland ecosystems throughout the western United States. Although disturbance processes/regimes and reactions to environmental changes are integral to the function and evolution of ecosystems, the manifold effects are often socioeconomically undesirable, and thus are perceived as threats to society at large.

Major threat issues in the western wildlands include:

• The frequency, extent, and severity of wildland fire have increased dramatically with correspondingly increased threats to human health and real property, and impacts on the functions and values of ecosystems.
• Introduction and spread of exotic invasives and atypical expansion of native plants, animals, insects, and pathogens can significantly affect the integrity and function of forest, rangeland, and aquatic ecosystems, including viability of native species and habitats, and can threaten social and economic values of ecosystems.
• Urban expansion and other forms of land use change comprise societally imposed ecological disturbances that together are significantly affecting the distribution, structure, function, and values of forests and rangelands. These impacts are expected to increase in the future in response to changing human demographics and needs.
• Lastly, the realities of climate change have become recognized as a primary environmental concern of the 21st century. Yet knowledge of the potential impacts of climate change on ecosystems and resource-dependent publics is incomplete, and science-based options for coping with such impacts have received even less attention.
  

Currently WWETAC and cooperators are investigating several aspects of threat interactions in western wildlands. These include:

• Nationwide Forest Imputation Study (NaFIS)
• Fire, bark beetles and salvage logging in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
• Evaluating interactions between insect infestations and fire extent and fire severity: A preliminary investigation in Washington and Oregon
• Probabilistic risk models for multiple disturbances: an example of forest insects and wildfires
• Sudden oak death and fire
• Landscape-scale enhanced mountain pine beetle and climate change threat assessment
• Adapting and improving Swiss needle cast management tools to incorporate climate change projections
• Synthesis of effects of insect-caused tree mortality on fire characteristics
• Prescribed fire regime and grazing effects on understory vegetation and exotic invasive plants
• Evaluation of models for assessment of threats to wildlands in the Western United States from displacement by cheatgrass and pinyon-juniper woodlands
• Evaluating soil risks associated with severe wildfire and ground-based logging
• Rapid threat assessment: genetically modified plants in wildland ecosystems
• Influence of bark beetles and black stain root disease on delayed mortality predictions of prescribed fire-damaged ponderosa pine in the eastern Cascades
• Western riparian threats assessment
• Forests, insects and pathogens, and climate change workshop
• GMWest: a risk assessment system for gypsy moth introductions in the Pacific Northwest
• A pilot application of ecological risk assessment to the management of landscape change in the Interior Landscape Analysis System (INLAS) project area site, upper Grande Ronde River watershed
• Mapping forest composition and structure in the Pacific Coast States with gradient nearest neighbor imputation (GNN)
• A national early warning system for environmental threats
• Vegetation Models and Climate Change Workshop– January 23-25, 2008, Portland, Oregon
• Interactions of forest pathogens and climate change
• National environmental threat assessment maps (NETAM)
• Western Forestry Leadership Coalition threats to western private forests
• Annotated Bibliography of Climate and Bark Beetles of Western Forests
• Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment GeoService
• Adapting and improving Swiss needle cast management tools to incorporate climate change projections
• Assessment review of remote sensing technologies for threat detection