Treesearch

Increasing the population of spring Chinook salmon and summer steelhead in Washington state’s Methow River is a goal of the Upper Columbia Spring Chinook Salmon and Steelhead Recovery Plan. Spring Chinook salmon and summer steelhead are listed as endangered and threatened, respectively, under the Endangered Species Act. Installing logjams and reconnecting the river to its floodplain are management actions being undertaken to restore salmon habitat. However, researchers with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, the U.S. Geological Survey, and Idaho State University...

Managers use restorative fire and thinning for ecological benefits and to convert fuel-heavy forests to fuel-lean landscapes that lessen the threat of stand-replacing wildfire. In this study, we evaluated the long-term impact of thinning and prescribed fire on soil biochemistry and the mycorrhizal fungi associated with ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa). Study sites were located in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon where prescribed fire treatments implemented in 1998 and thinning treatments in 2000 included prescribed fire, mechanical thinning of forested areas, a combination of...

Trail-based recreation is a popular use of public forests in the United States, and four types are common: allterrain vehicle (ATV) riding, mountain biking, hiking, and horseback riding. Effects on wildlife, however, are controversial and often a topic of land use debates. Accordingly, we studied trail-based recreation effects on elk (Cervus canadensis), a wide-ranging North American ungulate highly sought for hunting and viewing on public forests, but that is sensitive to human activities, particularly to motorized traffic on forest roads. We hypothesized that elk would respond to...

Through contracting and timber sales, the private sector is engaged in management of national forest lands and local community economies in the United States. But there is little recent research about current relationships between these lands and timber purchasers that could better inform future timber and biomass sale and business assistance policies and programs. We conducted a survey of timber-purchasing businesses active in six USDA Forest Service regions where ecosystem restoration and wildfire risk reduction policies have been prevalent to examine their characteristics, reliance on...

Sparsely settled forests (SSF) are poorly studied, coupled natural and human systems involving rural communities in forest ecosystems that are neither largely uninhabited wildland nor forests on the edges of urban areas. We developed and applied a multidisciplinary approach to define, map, and examine changes in the spatial extent and structure of both the landscapes and human populations of SSF in the United States. We estimated that the SSF in the contiguous United States, which are home to only 6–7% of the population, account for over 60% of all forested land and over 30% of all land....

Air quality is a critical issue affecting the health of billions of people worldwide, yet often little is known about what is in the air we breathe. To reduce air pollution’s health impacts, pollution sources must first be reliably identified. Otherwise, it is impossible to design and effectively enforce environmental standards. However, urban networks of air quality monitors are often too widely spaced to identify the sources of air pollutants, especially for pollutants that do not disperse far from their sources. Developing high-resolution pollution maps with data from these widely...

Building resilience to natural disturbances is a key to managing forests for adaptation to climate change. To date, most climate adaptation guidance has focused on recommendations for frequent-fire forests, leaving few published guidelines for forests that naturally experience infrequent, stand-replacing wildfires. Because most such forests are inherently resilient to stand-replacing disturbances, and burn severity mosaics are largely indifferent to manipulations of stand structure (i.e., weather-driven, rather than fuel-driven fire regimes), we posit that pre-fire climate adaptation...

Traditional analysis in population genetics evaluates differences among groups of individuals and, in some cases, considers the effects of distance or potential barriers to gene flow. Genetic variation of organisms in complex landscapes, seascapes, or riverine systems, however, may be shaped by many forces. Recent research has linked habitat heterogeneity and landscape or seascape configuration to genetic structure by integrating methods from landscape ecology, population genetics, and spatial statistics in approaches known as landscape or seascape genetics. However, functional differences...

In estuaries, land-surface and tidal elevation conspire to influence the amount of salt-water inundation in a specific location, ultimately affecting the distribution of estuary vegetation. Plants vary in their tolerances to salinity and inundation. Understanding even small changes in land-surface elevation at a site scale provides relevant information to managers seeking to design effective long-term restoration projects. Restoration of estuary habitats has been identified as a tool to mediate some anticipated effects of climate change, including flooding from sea-level rise, precipitation...

Resource managers have long mapped biophysical forest data. Often lacking, however, is relevant social science data for understanding the variety of human needs a given landscape fulfills. For nearly a decade, Lee Cerveny has been exploring how to provide this data on public lands around the Pacific Northwest. Cerveny is a research social scientist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station. In collaboration with several colleagues, she is using in-person mapping exercises and workshops with graphic information system software to capture social values, ecosystem benefits, and resource...