ORNL and U.S. Forest Service’s Hyper-Precise Forest Disturbance Tool Aids Southeast Recovery

A new forest disturbance tracking tool has been on the front lines since Hurricane Helene’s devastating march across the US Southeast, offering vital information both during and after the environmental disaster. The U.S. Forest Service and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) collaborated to create the ForWarn visualization tool, which uses satellite imagery to track the state of forest regions across the country and identify changes and disturbances with remarkable accuracy.

Hurricane Helene left the Forest Service’s Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center in Asheville, North Carolina, idle due to electrical disruptions, but ForWarn carried on with its operations as usual. The technology, which was hosted by ORNL, was crucial in identifying the areas that had been most severely damaged, detecting significant canopy changes that were subsequently confirmed by traditional aerial photography.

According to a recent ORNL research, ForWarn not only shows the degree of the damage but also identifies locations that could need immediate attention. According toJitendra Kumar of ORNL, “ForWarn helps quickly identify areas that may need remediation such as timber harvesting or prescribed burns as piles of felled trees dry out and potentially pose wildfire hazards.” In order to reduce additional risks and speed up recovery efforts, the system’s capacity to support expedited evaluations guarantees quicker reaction times for corrective actions.

With ForWarn’s watchful satellite eyes offering a true picture of forest health or distress, resource managers and stakeholders may rest easy. Because of its precise, almost real-time tracking capabilities, experts can plan treatments efficiently, potentially saving time, money, and even the forests themselves. ForWarn’s data is still crucial for charting the path to ecological restoration among the populations and ecosystems devastated by Hurricane Helene in the Southeast.

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