Call for Papers

Final Call for Papers

Advances in Threat Assessment and Their
Application to Forest and Rangeland Management

July 18-20, 2006
Millenium Harvest House Hotel
Boulder, Colorado

We are no longer accepting abstracts. However, if you would like to contribute to the Forest Environmental Threats web site, contact: John Pye, 919-549-4013, jpye@fs.fed.us

Environmental threats include all activities, events, organisms, or materials likely to disrupt natural ecosystems, degrade ecological functions, or impair the flow of benefits which derive from them.  North American forests and rangelands are affected by a host of natural and anthropogenic threats, including invasive species, pests, disease, uncharacteristic fire, severe weather, climate change, and urbanization and other conversions of wildlands.

This upcoming conference is organized by the Eastern and Western Threat Assessment Centers of the USDA Forest Service as part of their mission to generate, integrate, and apply knowledge to predict, detect, and assess environmental threats to public and private forests of the United States.  This conference is designed to integrate the latest scientific and experience-based knowledge and deliver it to managers in a timely, useful, and user friendly manner.  The conference will foster exchange between those developing new knowledge and tools for threat assessment and those responsible for managing forests and rangelands.  Presentations and panel discussions will be targeted at land managers and policy makers engaged in strategic planning, risk analysis, or broad-scale threat detection and assessment.  Lesser emphasis will be placed on tactical activities such as incident response or treatment methods for specific pests.  The conference is designed to summarize the current state of the science of risk analysis as applied to U.S. forest and rangeland ecosystems and show how these advances can be used by the broader management community. 

The program provides for four types of contributions:

• Syntheses of the science of risk assessment, as presentations with submitted papers
• Experience-based knowledge, as presentations by senior managers
• Case studies showing the application of risk analysis in the eastern or western U.S., as presentations with submitted papers
• Any topic related to environmental threats to forests, given as posters

The organizing committee intends for all accepted scientific synthesis contributions to be peer reviewed and published in a single volume book by the Southern and Pacific Northwest Research Stations of the USDA Forest Service.  The same material will be reformatted and incorporated into the Forest Encyclopedia Network (www.forestencyclopedia.net) as a new Forest Environmental Threats Encyclopedia.  A few of the experience-based knowledge and case study presentations may be invited for inclusion in the book and online encyclopedia, depending on their merit and other circumstances. Poster presentations will not be published in the book but their subject matter may be requested for inclusion in the online encyclopedia at some future date.

Conference sponsors are particularly interested in scientific syntheses on the following topics:

Status of immediate and long-term threats Probabilistic risk analysis Simulation modeling Remote sensing and geospatial technologies Risk characterization and communication Risk management across spatial and temporal scales

Multiple interacting stressors Decision making under risk Risk mitigation alternatives Monitoring strategies and protocols Uncertainty estimation and representation Implications of mixed ownerships Supporting healthy-forest management

This call solicits abstracts for any of the four types of contributions. The abstract should clearly describe the paper’s contribution to the science or application of risk analysis. Abstracts are limited to 300 words except for scientific syntheses papers, where extended abstracts of 500-700 words are requested. Include with the abstract paper title, authors, affiliations, corresponding author, and contribution type (scientific synthesis, experience-based knowledge, case study, poster).

For scientific synthesis papers, each submission should strive to synthesize a significant portion of the current science of risk analysis in one of the topics mentioned above. It should also provide example(s) of its application or indicate how the science could be used by managers.  Papers summarizing experience-based knowledge should strive to compare and contrast different management strategies that have worked well (or poorly) and provide a “lessons learned” perspective on the chosen topic.  The Poster section is not restricted to syntheses--specific research studies are encouraged in any of the topics listed above, or on other topics related to environmental risk assessment.

Timeline

November 30, 2005:  abstracts due.  They should be submitted electronically to risk-abstracts@fs.fed.us

December 15, 2005:  authors notified regarding acceptance.  Conference organizers will work closely with authors of accepted presentations to determine appropriate publication plans for written contributions.

February 15, 2006:  detailed outlines due for each paper to be published in the book and online encyclopedia.  Authors will be expected to work closely with the editorial staff to minimize overlap and fill gaps in content between chapters.

March 15, 2006:  agenda and registration details published on the conference web-site.

July 18-20, 2006: Conference held and papers submitted by authors for peer review.

September 15, 2006:  peer reviews completed and results back to authors.

October 15, 2006:  author revisions completed and submitted by authors.  Start of online encyclopedia uploading.

January, 2009: Final paper imported to the encyclopedia, edited, and published.

February, 2009: Desktop layout process begun for hardcopy publication as a joint PNW/SRS General Technical Report.

Sponsored by:

Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center, Pacific Northwest Station

Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center, Southern Research Station

Cooperative State Research, Education & Extension Service

Southern Forest Research Partnership

Southern Regional Extension Forestry