Treesearch

Background: Prescribed fire is a critical tool for managers of dry fire-prone forests used to create more fire resilient forests, improve wildlife habitat and increase understory diversity. However, there are still knowledge gaps around how to apply fire to achieve and balance desired conditions, such as how the forest understory responds to frequency of burning. We leveraged a unique long-term prescribed burn experiment and evaluated the responses of different understory vegetation components to differing fire return intervals (5-, 10-, 20-year) including two common shrub species of...

Forest and wildfire management in the 21 century requires working across jurisdictional boundaries and with various land management entities. One important group includes Native American tribes, sovereign nations with unique legal and political standings who possess deeply rooted, intergenerational knowledge of ecological processes and landscape dynamics. This research seeks to learn from and engage with existing landscape-scale efforts where tribes are leading the way in cross-boundary ecosystem collaboration. In this paper, we synthesize recent field experiences and identify emergent...

This report provides detailed estimates and highlights key findings from U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data collected across its Alaska Susitna-Copper FIA unit in 2019 and 2020. The Susitna-Copper FIA unit encompasses much of the Susitna River and upper Copper River watersheds and is one of six FIA inventory units designed to measure the expansive boreal forests of Alaska. Estimates of forest area, volume, aboveground biomass, and ecosystem carbon are provided across land ownerships, forest types, and forest demographics throughout the...

Protected area (PA) managers balance the need to provide quality visitor experiences with other management objectives (e.g., conservation, economic use), particularly in multi-use agencies. Sustainability science has informed PA management, emphasizing consideration of economic, environmental, and social interactions. Sustainable management of outdoor recreation has received far less attention. Moreover, there has been a lack of agreement among PA managers about how sustainable outdoor recreation is defined, operationalized, managed, or monitored. Having a shared understanding of ‘sustainab...

Forests can affect stream structure and function, but evaluations linking freshwater biodiversity to watershed-scale forest-stand conditions are limited. We evaluated competing hypotheses about spatial patterns of freshwater biodiversity by combining species inventories of vertebrates and invertebrates from traditional and environmental DNA (eDNA) methods across 24 temperate watersheds of young to old forests (37 to 124 y old). Freshwater taxonomic and functional richness of invertebrates were, on average, 1.2-fold and 1.5-fold higher, respectively, in older forests (>75 y) than in younger...

Increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere are warming and changing climate globally. Policymakers and land managers want to know the effectiveness of different approaches to reduce the increase in GHG while mitigating effects of future climate change. Forests can store large amounts of carbon and can gain or lose carbon relatively rapidly, making them a focus of study. A variety of ecosystem models have been applied to estimate hard-to-measure forest stocks and processes and to project alternative management scenarios into the future.We examined the...

Peatland forest ecosystems play a critical ecological, economic, and cultural role by sequestering carbon, supporting biodiversity, the provisioning of conventional and non-conventional wood products, and providing habitat for specialists. Historically, forest management in these systems has used clearcut harvests to maximize pulp production, often resulting in structurally simplified stands vulnerable to climate change. As climate change reshapes boreal systems through warming, altered hydrology, and increased disturbance, identifying structural features that promote resilience is...

While the tourism literature has tangentially investigated concepts related to tourism’s impact on the livability of communities through studies on topics such as overtourism, there has yet to be a direct measure of residents’ perceptions towards the livability of tourism destinations and how these perceptions of livability influence resident support for tourism. Using Livability Theory and a Conservation of Resources theoretical framework, our research samples residents from the nature-based tourism gateway community of Brevard in Transylvania County, North Carolina, to validate the...

Fog is a key part of the hydrological cycle in many regions of the world. Coastal fog specifically influences coastal biomes and impacts maritime activities and commerce. Due to complex interactions with landforms, the spatial distributions of coastal fog frequency defy simple characterization. This study is the first to analyze the summertime spatio-temporal heterogeneity of fog along the Oregon coast, a region which depends on coastal fog for shading and as a hydrological input during its warm, dry summers. Direct measures of fog require expensive optical instrumentation that is not...

Dryocopus pileatus (Pileated Woodpecker) landscape use is widespread in the Pacific Northwest, especially in forested locations with structurally complex canopies, but declines at higher latitudes, higher elevations, and in areas of greater topographic complexity. High-use sites featured high conifer canopy cover and high Abies grandis (grand fir) basal area. These findings emerged from our analyses of ∼1.7 million hours of acoustic recordings collected from 3,948 sites distributed across 10 million hectares of forest lands in the Pacific Northwest, USA. Data were processed using a deep...