Treesearch

The natural environment is integral to supporting healthy and resilient communities. Community forests (CFs) are forested parcels, typically in rural areas, where community members have access, share governance, and receive various benefits. While considerable research demonstrates that urban parks and forests are important for human health, similar assessments are less available for CFs specifically. Although CFs exist in multiple countries, their policy, ecological, ownership, and governance contexts differ significantly. This review focuses on CFs in the United States. The goals of this...

Habitat suitability models (HSMs) play an important role in conservation planning by identifying areas for habitat management and guiding surveys for population discovery and monitoring. The wood turtle Glyptemys insculpta is a riverine turtle that uses both riparian and upland environments. Habitat loss and degradation have resulted in range‐wide declines of this species throughout the United States. Previous HSMs have been developed for wood turtles; however, no published HSM we are aware of exists for their range in the midwestern United States (including parts of Iowa, Michigan,...

Selection mosaic theory explains observations of polymorphism in host-pathogen interactions in terms of spatially variable natural selection but does not account for population dynamics. In contrast, classical host-pathogen theory easily explains observations of population cycles, but does not explain the persistence of pathogen polymorphism. Here, we synthesize these two frameworks to understand the effects of population cycles on pathogen polymorphism. We show that geographic variation in the frequency of two morphotypes of a baculovirus that infects the Douglas-fir tussock moth (Orgyia...

The genus Armillaria is a broad group of basidiomycete (Agaricales, Physalacriaceae) plant pathogens that can have detrimental effects on woody hosts in forested, urban, and horticultural landscapes. Several species are known as aggressive root pathogens on both conifers and deciduous woody plants. Armillaria species are considered white rot fungi due to their capacity to degrade both lignin and cellulose in woody tissues. Armillaria mexicana was recently described as a new species found in peach (Prunus persica) orchards of Coatepec Harinas, State of Mexico. However, a subsequent study...

Although Armillaria solidipes was described in 1900, confusion has surrounded the appropriate use of this taxonomic epithet, largely because DNA sequence–based characterization and an associated culture were unavailable for the original holotype. An epitype for A. solidipes (previously known as North American Biological Species I) is established herein, along with morphological descriptions and genetic characterization that clearly distinguish A. solidipes, which is found in North America, from A. ostoyae (previously known as European Biological Species C), which is found in Eurasia. Of...

Restoration of riparian vegetation is an objective for recovery of threatened salmonids in the interior Pacific Northwest (PNW; USA). However, bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) are overlooked despite their capacity to provide stream habitat for invertebrates, an important salmonid food. The role of bryophytes as invertebrate habitat is little studied in the PNW. We investigated macroinvertebrate communities in bryophytes across three aquatic habitat types (headwaters, mid‐order streams and wetlands) in a salmonid‐bearing stream system in the Blue Mountains, northeastern Oregon...

The boreal biome, the largest terrestrial biome on Earth, is increasingly vulnerable to climate change due to warming twice as rapidly as the global average. Climate change has increased the temperature, frequency, severity, and amount of area burned, which is leading to changes in the spatial extent of forest type and species range. These rapid ecological shifts necessitate fine-scale monitoring of forest type to detect potential type conversions and guide management interventions. In this study, we present a framework for forest type classification combining field plots and high-resolutio...

Understanding fire behavior is a crucial step in wildfire risk assessment and management. Accurate and near real-time knowledge of the spatio-temporal characteristics of fuels is critical for analyzing pre-fire risk mitigation and managing active-fire emergency response. Geospatial modeling and land cover mapping using remote sensing combined with artificial intelligence techniques can provide fuel information at regional scales with high accuracy and resolution, as evidenced by the extensive recent work in the literature that appeared with increasing volume in the open literature. This...

Prescribed burning is an effective land management tool that provides a range of benefits, including ecosystem restoration and wildfire risk reduction. However, prescribed fires, just like wildfires, introduce smoke that degrades air quality. Furthermore, while prescribed fires help manage wildfire risk, they do not eliminate the possibility of wildfires. It is therefore important to also evaluate fire and smoke impacts from wildfires that may occur after a prescribed burn. In this study, we developed a framework for understanding the air quality and health related trade-offs between...

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 Washington. 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 all...