Articles

Scientists created a guidebook to help silviculturists transform even-aged ponderosa pine forests to muli-aged structures.

An Emerging Threat“ʻŌhiʻa are the cornerstone of the culture and environment in Hawaiʻi,” said Kylle Roy, a forest entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service Forest Health Protection program. Yet ʻōhiʻa trees are dying at an unprecedented rate, leading federal, state, and private land managers to collaborate in the search for a solution before it is too late.The culprit is rapid ʻōh...

Researchers from the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program have worked on a NASA mission called EDGE (Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer), which measures changes in the world’s forests. The mission was competitively selected in January of 2026 for an expected launch in 2030.

As the Pacific Southwest Research Station marks 100 years, the Eddy Arboretum's living collection and new interactive map show how science helps land managers prepare for the future.

The likelihood that a fireline or other potential control feature will prevent, slow, or otherwise alter wildfire behavior is not fixed—it can change substantially as wind, humidity, vegetation, and terrain conditions change. Fire managers from the Okanogan–Wenatchee National Forest along with researcher Jesse Young and colleagues coproduced research about wildfire containment-effectiveness.

Scientists identified bird biodiversity hotspots and found that if fires occur in these areas, about 30% of the hotspots will burn at high severity.

What if it were possible to detect the presence of rare species simply by sampling the air?

Increasing drought negatively impacts most wildlife worldwide. However, large gaps in our understanding remain, which makes managing this threat difficult.

Canada lynx show strong selection for unburned areas within wildfire perimeters.

New research advances understanding of how federal agencies have used aerial resources on wildfires. It quantifies the impact of various characteristics of a fire incident—including fuel moisture, weather, slope, access to water, and proximity to people and infrastructure—on how quickly aircraft arrive at a fire after it is discovered.

The Social Science Research Group (SSRG) for wildfire has built a Communication Alliance, or CommA, which brings together people from multiple organizations (including federal, state, local, international, independent, etc.) directly involved in wildland fire operations and communities.

It is often assumed that the thinning effects of fire mean that surviving trees grow more and have more water available to them. However, fire may also come with costs. Trees that survive fire, but sustain fire-caused injuries, may experience a temporary period of reduced growth and greater vulnerability to drought before they are able to take advantage of the effects of stand density reduction (such as less competition for water). This window of vulnerability is due to negative effects from fire-caused injuries like crown scorch, with more severe injuries likely having a stronger negative impact.

Forests and grasslands provide some of the cleanest, most reliable water in the country. But in a world with limited budgets, it can be difficult to justify long-term planning costs without knowing the value of present and future water benefits.

We often hear about the need to expand the pace and scale of hazardous fuel treatments that can reduce wildfire risk. Prescribed burning is one of the most important management tools for getting that work done. By looking at records of past burns and their associated weather conditions in northern California, our team gained a better understanding of what constitutes a suitable burn window, and we identified areas and times of year most favorable for prescribed burning.

Survival of western larch seedlings planted after a wildfire was driven mostly by site conditions—hot, dry, southwest‑facing locations had far higher mortality regardless of seed source. Seedlings from low‑elevation seed sources handled heat better, but the biggest determinant of success was simply planting in cooler, moister microsites.

A new study published in Nature Communications by researchers at the Forest Products Laboratory and the Southern Research Station, and their collaborators, tested several global forest conservation scenarios and evaluated how these scenarios affected harvestable area, roundwood production, and prices within the global forestry sector. These new results challenge previous findings and suggest that increased forest protection could, for most countries, result in a net economic gain.

This collection of research leverages a comprehensive dataset of wildfires spanning recent decades to examine patterns of and trends in ignitions across the western United States. Human-caused ignitions account for over 60% of all recorded wildfires across the western US and are responsible for the vast majority of wildfire-related societal impacts, underscoring the value of effective wildfire prevention and risk-mitigation strategies.

Managers need good maps to make good decisions, particularly at the project level, where fine details matter. FastFuels is a data-on-demand mapping platform that leverages multiple data sources to provide high fidelity forest and fuel data for a typical user-specified area within minutes. 3D data can be used with next generation fire models, supporting forest management, fuel treatment planning, prescribed fire planning, and risk assessment and mitigation efforts.

A new online modeling tool for predicting impacts of introduced species using the case study of preying mantid invasions in western Montana grasslands is available.

Scientists are looking at the link between environmental conditions, wildlife, and animal-borne pathogens to predict how natural and human-caused changes may influence disease. A new framework explores the dynamics of these diseases over large spatial and temporal scales.