"EPA/620-SR-94-006." "June 1994." Caption title. At head of title: Project summary.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has initiated a multiagency program to determine the current status and future trends in the nation's ecological resources. The Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) is focusing on broad resource groups such as inland surface waters, estuaries, arid lands, agroecosystems, and forests. The forest component of EMAP is a multiagency effort referred to as Forest Health Monitoring (FHM). The FHM program is jointly managed and largely funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service and EPA in cooperation with other program participants. The FHM program conducted a two-year demonstration study to test a suite of indicators considered important in assessing forest health. The selected study polots represented the loblolly/shortleaf pine forest type. The study is referred to in this report as the Southeast Loblolly/Shortleaf Pine Demonstration or SE DEMO. This interim report serves to initiate the indicator evaluation process and addresses the first objective of the study. Six criteria have been adopted by FHM and EMAP for indicator evaluation. The FHM program has developed an objective procedure for determining the status of indicators with respect to these six criteria. The indicators were evaluated from a statistical and biological perspective to ascertain their suitability in Detection Monitoring. After examination of data collected during the first year of the SE DEMO, several shortcomings were revealed that necessitated the implementation of two additional companion studies, the QA Reference Plot and Georgia Remeasurement Studies. These two studies will provide valuable information for addressing the index-period stability and high signal-to-noise ratio criteria. The data from these two studies, combined with the second year's data from the SE DEMO, will be used to evaluate the status of each indicator. These findings will be reported in the SE DEMO final report.