Vermont Forest Indicators Dashboard

Damage and Decay

Score for 2016:
--/5
Long-Term Trend:
Scores are 
Trees can become damaged for a variety of reasons ranging from lightning strikes, neighboring treefall, logging damage, poor growing conditions, insects, or genetics, to name a few. Physical damage to trees can reduce their life span by allowing diseases and fungi to infiltrate the wood, leading to rot and decay. While damaged and decaying trees have a vital role in the forest ecosystem through providing habitat and food for a variety of organisms from fungi to insects, an increase in the proportion of our trees that are classified as damaged or decaying can impact the value of our forests and suggest that trees are being negatively impacted by stressors. Here, damage and decay is a measure of the proportion of Vermont’s trees that are considered “non-growing stock. Non-growing stock trees are classified from a timber perspective and are trees with deformities, damage, or rot. We computed the ratio of these non-growing stock trees to all live trees on Forest Inventory and Analysis plots1. The current year is scored as the difference from the long-term mean (scored 0-1).