Treesearch

The Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) was designed to store and archive wildland fuel characteristics within fuelbeds, defined as the inherent physical characteristics of fuels that contribute to fire behavior and effects. The FCCS represents fuel characteristics in six strata including canopy, shrubs, herbaceous fuels, downed wood, litter-lichen-moss, and ground fuels. Each stratum is further divided into one or more categories and subcategories to represent the complexity of wildland and managed fuels. A variety of techniques to measure and summarize fuelbed data are...

Structure of vegetation significantly influences its flammability and resulting fire spread. Despite considerable amount of laboratory studies, experimental works carried out with full plant specimens, representative of field conditions, are still limited. Present study aims to collect meaningful experimental data on structure and flammability of shrub of rockrose and evaluate the predictions of a fire model (WFDS) against this dataset. Spatial distribution of fuel elements, sorted according to their characteristic thickness, was established from destructive measurements. 28 fire tests...

Coexistence of ecologically similar species can be maintained by partitioning along one or more niche axes. Three-dimensional structural complexity is central to facilitating resource partitioning between many forest species, but is underrepresented in field-based studies. We examined resource selection by sympatric northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina), a threatened species under the US Endangered Species Act, and nonnative barred owls (S. varia) in western Oregon, USA to explore the relative importance of canopy heterogeneity, vertical complexity of forest, and abiotic...

Effective conservation and management of small mammals require knowledge of the population dynamics of co-occurring species. We estimated the abundances, autocorrelations, and spatiotemporal associations of 4 small-mammal species from 2011–2016 using live-trapping mark-recapture methods on 9 sites across elevation and canopy openness gradients of a late-successional forest in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, on the west slope of the Oregon Cascades. We also quantified species-specific spatial variation in adult sex ratios and body mass. We used Huggins closed capture models to...

With the accumulating evidence of changing disturbance regimes becoming increasingly obvious, there is potential for disturbance ecology to become the most valuable lens through which climate-related disturbance events are interpreted. In this paper, I revisit some of the central themes of disturbance ecology and argue that the knowledge established in the field of disturbance ecology continues to be relevant to ecosystem management, even with rapid changes to disturbance regimes and changing disturbance types in local ecosystems. Disturbance ecology has been tremendously successful over...

To successfully reproduce, conifers must have impeccable timing—opening their female cones to receive pollen from the male cones of nearby trees. This timing is a response to temperature and other environmental cues. It is to the tree’s advantage to flower when risk of damaging frost is low, but early enough in the spring to take full advantage of the growing season.Douglas-fir is ecologically important and the cornerstone of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest. Seed orchard managers carefully breed different populations of the species to produce seedlings that will thrive in...

Stream habitat restoration in the Entiat River, Washington, has increased juvenile Chinook abundance in pools with engineered logjams (ELJs); however, high spatial, temporal, and inter-species variation complicates distinguishing treatment effects between restored and unrestored habitat. Here we show that the scale of post restoration effectiveness monitoring can also be a confounding factor in such studies. In three stream reaches, we conducted snorkel surveys of (1) spatially randomized untreated habitat in which we also randomized survey area, and (2) restored (ELJ) habitat that...

Recent empirical and theoretical studies have indicated that epizootics of baculoviruses in defoliating insects may result in the termination of outbreaks starting from lower initial infection rates than previously believed. This suggests that natural epizootics can preempt the need for costly and labor-intensive pest management measures because natural epizootics reduce or end outbreaks before substantial defoliation occurs. Such cases, however, require the ability to detect small amounts of infection at the beginning of the population’s life cycle. At hatching, Douglas-fir tussock moth...

Comparative landscape genetic studies provide insights into whether relationships between landscape features and patterns of spatial genetic structure differ among populations, species, habitat types, and regions. For species with fragmented distributions, especially when management practices contribute to fragmentation, tests of the factors structuring population connectivity are particularly important for understanding continued risks. We determined levels of genetic diversity and tested the relationships of landscape-scale vegetative, geographic, and climate variables with genetic...

This is a synthesis of our recent article in Biodiversity Conservation written in less technical language for wildlife managers for consideration for publication in the widely read magazine published by The Wildlife Society, "The Wildlife Professional." We introduce a new metric that we derived to batch-assess broad taxonomic groups relative to their climate sensitivity and rarity. We conducted a case study assessment of all fishes, amphibians, and reptiles with native ranges in Oregon, using our new metric. We also analyzed the data from these three taxa to see if it mattered how easily...