Treesearch

As the impacts of drought intensify with climate change, adaptation to drought is becoming an increasingly important consideration for tree breeding and forest management. This elevates the need to understand how breeding for faster growth affects drought tolerance and if breeding to improve drought tolerance could help mitigate the impacts of drought on forest health and productivity. To understand the implications for tree breeding in future climates, we studied how selective breeding of western larch (Larix occidentalis) for faster growth affects drought resistance (a component of...

Establishing riparian zones to protect fish has been a standard forest management practice in western Oregon and Washington for decades. But to effectively place these zones, one needs to know where fish are living. Brooke Penaluna, a research fisheries biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, has led the development of a new model that predicts the presence of fish more accurately than previous models or other methods, which relied heavily on electrofishing— a labor-intensive method of manually surveying streams. Her new model,...

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to the abrupt suspension of cruise ship visits under the U.S. Center for Disease Control’s “No Sail Order” resulting in loss of jobs and revenues for coastal communities of Southeast Alaska. We conducted case studies in three Southeast Alaska communities to learn how they responded to the abrupt loss of cruise tourism and to the economic and social challenges of COVID-19. Through data gathered in focus groups and convenience surveys, we ascertained the strategies that sustained households, businesses, and cultures amid the health threat and economic...

Site index is frequently used for deciding how to manage stands, however, it often omits or fails to accurately characterize the site-dependent growth of young (ages ≤8 years) trees. This early stage of development is a critical period in a rotation during which important management decisions with the potential to influence all future growth are made. To address this, we developed a new index of site quality for young, coastal Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco var. menziesii) stands in western Washington, USA. We used high-density light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scans...

Recovery of rare and imperiled species is often supported by targeting the dynamic drivers of abundance patterns. However, knowledge of these drivers can be obscured by challenges stemming from species detectability and autocorrelated data. Longfin Smelt (Spirinchus thaleichthys) in the San Francisco Bay-Delta have become rare as the result of dramatic declines in abundance. Abundance indices from a multitude of surveys in the Bay-Delta have documented these declines, but utilizing survey data to support recovery has been more challenging. To elucidate the spatiotemporal drivers of Longfin...

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) preserves and provides U.S. federal government records of historic and cultural value, including approximately 200,000 reels of 35 mm black-and-white motion picture film. Of immediate concern is allocating finite resources over a 5-year program to preserve the most at-risk, frequently used, and valuable films. To aid this need, we developed a decision-modeling approach based on film deterioration and acidity conditions, known or anticipated access requests, archival value, and other attributes. We used a Bayesian network parameterized...

Understanding how indirect effects of climate can interact with density-dependent processes has become increasingly important as variability changes resource availability for wildlife. Both climate and animal density can drive the abundance of vegetation and control the degree of competition for forage between ungulates. Further, climate-density relationships may be more pronounced for females in the population as they may need to compensate nutritionally for the energetic costs of raising young. Quantifying the effects of these relationships on individual animal performance is challenging...

Legacies of land use can persist for decades, thereby impacting populations, communities, and ecosystems long after the original disturbance has concluded. The coastal rainforests of western North America were fundamentally transformed by commercial logging throughout the 20th century, resulting in depauperate second-growth forests that provide limited understory production and foraging habitat for herbivores. The Tongass National Forest in Alaska, USA, is the largest contiguous tract of coastal temperate rainforest in the world, but nearly 200,000 ha of second-growth forest have created a...

Native bees are diverse and efficient pollinators that have been studied in many forested regions of the United States. However, such studies are rare in the inland Pacific Northwest. To address this gap, we examined 1) how blooming plant and bee communities differed between two forest types (warm-dry and cool-moist) in spring and summer and 2) how a suite of environmental conditions influenced these communities each season. We collected 4,469 bees from 122 species/morphospecies over two years. Bees were typically twice as abundant in warm-dry versus cool-moist forests. In addition, bloom...

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has revolutionized wildlife monitoring by lowering barriers associated with data collection. Data from PAM can support adaptive management programs aimed at meeting multiple objectives in the face of uncertainty. Pairing PAM with acoustic classifiers capable of identifying sounds produced by wildlife can generate thousands of species detections across managed landscapes. However, such species detections represent both true- and false-positive detections, and human review is required to generate accurate detection data. Although collecting audio recordings...