Treesearch

Community forests (CFs) are a forest ownership and governance approach that enable community members and other key stakeholders to cooperatively manage local forests to produce a range of benefits that align with local community priorities. While well-studied internationally, there is a lack of research that systematically documents how CFs can contribute to rural prosperity in the U.S. amidst ongoing socioeconomic and environmental change. We adapt a framework developed to characterize the contributions of forests to rural prosperity in the international context to investigate the...

In 2020, six wildfires burned more than 1 million acres over the Labor Day weekend in Oregon. Jeremy Fried, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, saw an opportunity to study how these wind-driven megafires affected forest structure and carbon storage, and how forest structure before the fires may have influenced fire severity.With research fellows Sebastian Busby and Angela Klock, Fried developed a model that estimated wind speed when wildfire entered forest plots previously inventoried through the national Forest Inventory and Analysis...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in coastal Alaska. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining...

A wide variety of wildlife species occur in red spruce (Picea rubens) and spruce-fir forests, and these forest types represent optimal habitat for several vertebrate and invertebrate species of conservation concern. In this chapter, we synthesized our understanding of wildlife diversity in red spruce and spruce-fir ecosystems in the central and southern Appalachians, and identified species that are reliant on occurrence of these ecosystems. We also reviewed six major insect pests of red spruce in our focal regions. Red spruce and spruce-fir ecosystems are important habitats for at least 1...

Land development in the southwestern USA has caused intensive landscape change and created conflicts with Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia), which rely on underground burrows and occupy sites often attractive for development. Passive relocation is a mitigation method for owls on development sites that involves excluding owls from their burrows followed by collapsing and filling those burrows to prevent reuse. We worked with developers in Phoenix, Arizona, to locate owls, and we evaluated how passive relocation and other factors influenced their survival, dispersal, and reproduction. From...

The National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program provides the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and the U.S. Congress with statistically sound estimates of recreation use in the National Forest System and the economic contribution of those recreation visits to rural communities. After 25 years and five rounds of NVUM sampling, the program has assembled long-term monitoring datasets to characterize forest visitors and understand spatial and temporal patterns of use. However, because the visitor-intercept sampling methodology for NVUM surveys is cost-intensive, program...

Fire is a significant disturbance agent, impacting forest structure and composition. In fire-adapted forests, fire can foster biodiversity by resetting successional processes and increasing habitat heterogeneity. However, fire suppression practices have altered historical fire regimes and left fire-adapted ecosystems largely unburned and the use of unburned forests by post-fire habitat specialists is understudied. Picoides arcticus (Black-backed Woodpecker) is a post-fire specialist that thrives in recently burned coniferous forests by exploiting heterogeneous patches of live and dead...

The northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) continues to decline across its range, threatened by habitat disturbances and invasive barred owls (Strix varia). We conducted a range‐wide spotted owl occupancy assessment using 2.1 million h of passive acoustic recordings from 4081 survey stations within 1027 randomly selected 5‐km 2 hexagons across six physiographic regions. Applying multistate occupancy models, we estimated probabilities of landscape use (by at least one northern spotted owl) and pair occupancy (occupied by both a male and a female), while accounting for imperfect...

Federal and state forest managers consider the effects of forest management, including no action, on carbon storage because of concerns of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Most CO2 emissions in the United States result from burning fossil fuels. Forests represent a large store of carbon, but individual stands can absorb or emit substantial amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere over durations as short as a decade. Currently, wildland forests (those outside of urban zones) in the United States are a net sink of carbon,...

We identify at-risk amphibians tied to aquatic-riparian habitats in U.S. Pacific Northwest forests for fire-management considerations and synthesize amphibian ecology and fire- and forest-management effects to provide guidance for sustainability of these amphibians during prefire fuel management, active wildfire management, and postfire management activities. We focus on seven amphibian groups that have both state-scale sensitive-species status and modeled viability concerns in regional moist coniferous forests. Chief concerns from both fire and fire management activities for these animals...