History and results of the Northern Forest Health Monitoring Program

Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program was established because of a concern that the forests in the United States were declining. The program was established to monitor the state of and changes in forest conditions across the nation. This report looks at the distributions of trees into various rating categories for three variables collected on the FHM plots from 1991 through 1997. Based on these distributions, some year to year fluctuations are seen in the samples, attributed mostly to changes in the sample composition. Future analyses will need to control these differences in sample composition and will need to look at trends across the same set of trees.