The Division of Forestry & Fire Protection works closely with the U.S. Forest Service, State & Private Forestry. The USFS Forest Health Highlights site also has information on Alaskan insects, diseases, bibliography listing, and links to other Forest Health sites. The section presents a program overview, personnel information, current forest insect and disease conditions throughout the state, forest insect and disease biology, control, impacts, SbExpert software and other Forest Health issues. This page is periodically updated and is a good source of information on Alaska Forest Health issues. A link to the 2001 revised U.S. Forest Service, State & Private Forestry publication "Insects &Diseases of Alaskan Forests" is also now available from this site. The handbook was last revised in October 1987.
The Forest Health Monitoring Clearinghouse provides special resource databases of forest health related information in Alaska to land managers, scientists, and the general public. Fourteen statewide data layers are available for downloading, including Vegetation/land cover, ECOMAP and Ecoregions, Wetlands Inventory, Timber Harvest and other disturbances, Yearly Insect and Disease Damage, Fire History, Fire Protection Zones, Fire Management Boundaries, Fire Fuels Models, Land Status/Ownership, Elevation, Hydrography, Soils, and Permafrost.
The State of Alaska, Department of Natural Resources' Geographic Data Clearinghouse website is directly patterned and linked to the AGDC site maintained at the U. S. Geological Survey, EROS (Earth Resource Observation Satellite) field office in Anchorage--SEE AGDC link below. The State of Alaska-maintained section of this site contains data layers information in the form of metadata, or "data about the data", that describe the content, quality, condition, and other characteristics of the data. The metadata is compliant with federal geographic data committee (FGDC) standards. For example, data on land status, transportation, physical boundaries-such as coastline, conservation units, etc., and links to state resource information (e.g., forest pest damage survey data found under "Natural Resources, Forestry") and links to other agency GIS data can be found here. The site is not complete since statewide participation for data submission and access links does not exist at this time, however, the goal is to make this a clearinghouse node for state and local agencies.
The National Forest Health Monitoring Home Page. Forest Health Monitoring is a national program administered by the U.S. Forest Service and member states. FHM is designed to determine the status, changes, and trends in indicators of forest condition on an annual basis. The State of Alaska provides information to the program, including its annual forest pest damage database, but is not yet a formal member. Links can also be found on this site to other forest health data and program contacts for USFS regional offices and the states that have provided data to the program.
Kenai Peninsula Borough Mapping & Mitigation Program Web Site. This site supplies a direct link to the Kenai Peninsula Borough's Ecosystem Level Vegetation Mapping Initiative (ELVMI). This initiative is a vegetation mapping project to provide detailed vegetation mapping information to support fire risk and hazard management in the aftermath of a major spruce beetle epidemic on the Kenai Peninsula. The site gives a progress update on the mapping project, which is designed to produce a forest health/hazard map and GIS data base.
A site maintained by the University of Georgia on forest and urban pests, including a good section on bark beetles. Another website maintained by the U.S. Forest Service contains informative leaflets describing a number of the most common forest insect and disease pests in the U.S.-the "FIDL" web area is at www.fs.usda.gov/goto/fhp/fidls. These are just a few examples of some of the insect and disease information resources that can be found on the World Wide Web
The Alaska Geospatial Data Clearinghouse is a component of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). The Clearinghouse provides a pathway to find geospatial referenced data and associated metadata. The site is a link to data available from a multiple of federal, state and local agencies. The site is currently administered at the U.S. Geological Survey, EROS field office in Anchorage. From this website the Forest Health Monitoring Clearinghouse can be reached.