Articles

The Meadow Creek Collaborative is built on a grassroots foundation of long-term partnerships. Research hydrologist Adam Price explains some of the goals of the project, which include sustaining the First Foods of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

A research team set out to better understand where mechanical fuel reduction treatments are feasible, where there might be operational or administrative constraints, and how managers could overcome these constraints.

Predicting availability of water is a difficult task, but it just got easier thanks to a new model and interactive tool produced by researchers from the U.S. Forest Service Eastern and Western Threat Assessment Centers and other partners. The tool lets users investigate their own questions about water availability by watershed under future climate and landcover conditions.

Researchers reviewed the causes of altered fire regimes in sagebrush landscapes and the longer-term effects of fuel treatments, providing a comprehensive summary of their findings and a discussion around treatment effects on fuels, fire behavior, ecosystem resilience, and landscape resistance.

Biodiversity is declining faster in fresh water than it is in marine or terrestrial ecosystems. Becky Flitcroft, a research fish biologist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, works in partnership with forest managers to support a future with resilient aquatic ecosystems.

Support for biochar as a way to re-introduce carbon back into forest soils, remediate mine lands, and to restore soil health is picking up traction across the western United States.

Forest Service scientist Anthony Vaudo approaches his research from a “bee’s-eye” perspective with a focus on the impacts of pollen nutrition in bee and plant community interactions.

While fire promotes cheatgrass, invasion in the absence of fire drives the overall risk of conversion to cheatgrass dominance in the sagebrush biome.

Steve Wondzell, a research ecologist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station, has a long track record of building partnerships that benefit both research and the restoration goals of USDA Forest Service partners. Here are two examples of successful coproduction of knowledge.

This June, under the blazing Nevada sun, USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station research ecologist, Alexandra (Ali) Urza, led a group of partners through a pinyon-juniper woodland to gather input for improving ecosystem resilience.

Over the summer, a team of researchers led by Forest Service Research Ecologist Christopher "Kit" O’Connor, forest managers, and supporting partners kicked off a series of workshops geared toward this mission and new chapter in PODs development.

Scientists use genetic tools to investigate the risks and benefits of translocating foxes to help their populations recover.

Different climatic conditions between plant populations are associated with differences in their pollen nutritional quality for bees.

A huge mussel study in 92 streams across 13 states is underway. As part of that study, researchers needed an objective way to assess mussel health in each stream – so they developed the Mussel Assemblage Health Index and made it available as a spreadsheet tool.

On August 5, 1949, 13 smokejumpers lost their lives responding to a fire that at first glance appeared manageable. The tragedy shook the wildland fire community and sparked a nationwide research effort aimed at better understanding wildfire behavior and improving firefighter safety.

A new protocol explains how to use Terrestrial Laser Scanning for fast and accurate fire effects monitoring.

This guide discusses seven management considerations for evaluating vegetation treatments in shrubland and pinyon-juniper ecosystems vulnerable to the wildfire crisis.

A Forest Service researcher developed a scientific model pinpointing where fuels treatments make the most sense. With the model, forest staff can measure where forest density exceeds desired conditions — and more — to target fuels treatments.

Wildfire suppression is costly. Over the last decade, suppression has cost the USDA Forest Service and the Department of the Interior an average of $2.9 billion per year.

A better understanding of how invasive annuals like cheatgrass dominate grassland ecosystems can help managers manage plant community trajectories following a disturbance.