Forest Watch is a New England-wide environmental education program designed to introduce both teachers and their students to field, laboratory, and satellite data analysis methods for assessing the state-of-health of local forest stands. Forest Watch provides workshops which are designed to help K-12 and post-secondary teachers introduce students to selected hands-on techniques, based on UNH research methods, for evaluating the health of white pine (Pinus strobus)—a bioindicator for ground-level ozone. Through the Forest Watch program, students become actively involved in doing meaningful scientific research, and in the process, collect and compile data useful to UNH researchers in their on-going regional survey of forest health. This program was introduced in 1992 to six New Hampshire schools; it is now in the seventh year, with participating schools from New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maryland.

The Forest Watch program grew out of research conducted by Dr. Barry Rock of Complex Systems Research Center at the University of New Hampshire (UNH); his research in the early 1990s focused on assessing the relative sensitivity of several bioindicator species to controlled levels of ozone exposure in order characterize responses at the visual, physiological, and spectral levels. Rock and his associates demonstrated that white pine needle response to elevated levels of ozone above 80 ppb (parts per billion) occurred within one hour of exposure. This work led to the identification of many other potential bioindicator species for ozone exposure, including black cherry, dogbane, milkweed, bigleaf aster and white ash. White pine was selected for study in the Forest Watch program because it was shown to be sensitive to ozone exposure, it occurs commonly across New England (often near schools), and it exhibits characteristic needle symptoms year-round. All of the other bioindicators are deciduous and exhibit their symptoms only during the midsummer (late July to early August), when schools are not in session.

Students participate in three types of activities in Forest Watch, each patterned after activities conducted by professional environmental scientists. The activities include:

forest stand assessment,
laboratory-based assessment of damage symptoms, and
image processing/data analysis.

Each activity is designed to provide results which are both quantitative and meaningful at a variety of scales, from the cellular to the forest stand level and up to a regional scale.