Treesearch

In the western US, grazing management on federal lands containing habitat for fish species listed under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) has sparked social conflict and litigation for decades. To date, the problem has been addressed through a top-down environmental governance system, but rangeland managers and grazing permittees now believe there is a need for more innovative management strategies. This article explores how social–ecological systems (SES) science can address rangeland management challenges associated with the survival and recovery of ESA-listed fish species on federal...

A balanced diet and regular exercise are fundamental for good health, and a daily dose of nature may be equally important. Nearly 40 years of research has demonstrated that “metro nature”—nature found in urban environments, such as parks or tree-lined streets—provides positive and measurable health benefits and improves people’s quality of life. A research team led by Kathleen Wolf, a research social scientist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, found that the health benefits associated with metro nature have a calculable economic impact. The team surveyed...

Young stands are commonly assumed to require centuries to develop into late-successional forest habitat. This viewpoint reflects the fact that young stands often lack many of the structural features that define late-successional habitat, and that these features derive from complex stand dynamics that are difficult to mimic with forest management. Variable density thinning (VDT) is a silvicultural strategy designed to accelerate development of late-successional habitat by applying a variety of harvest intensities within a stand. Previous reports indicate that VDT has had initial success...

Trees have evolved to time flowering to maximize outcrossing, minimize exposure to damaging frosts, and synchronize development with soil moisture and nutrient availability. Understanding the environmental cues that influence the timing of reproductive budburst will be important for predicting how flowering phenology of trees will change with a changing climate, and aid in the time-sensitive management of seed orchards. We examined how temperature influenced the timing of female flowering of coastal Douglas-fir with over 4500 flowering observations of trees from 12 sites across western...

These data and analyses support the research article late herbivory suppresses deciduous woody plant establishment following salmonid stream restoration” Averett et al. (2017) [1]. The data and analyses presented here include: (1) planting density, survival and growth (two years post restoration) of riparian plantings along an ~11 km stream reach in northeastern Oregon as a function of herbivory treatment (protected/not protected from wild ungulate herbivory), habitat type, and planting species; and (2) abundance and height distributions of naturally occurring deciduous woody species along...

The spatial and temporal scales of hyporheic exchange within the stream corridor are controlled by stream discharge and groundwater inflow interacting with streambed morphology. While decades of study have resulted in a clear understanding of how morphologic form controls hyporheic exchange at the feature scale, we lack comparable predictive power related to stream discharge and the spatial structure of groundwater inflows at the reach scale, where spatial heterogeneity in both geomorphic setting and hydrologic forcing are present. In this study, we simulated vertical hyporheic exchange...

This report highlights key findings from a comprehensive vegetation survey of all forested land across the state of Oregon. A total of 5,180 forested field plots in Oregon were visited by Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) crews over a 10-year period from 2001 to 2010. Oregon has 30 million acres of forest, covering nearly half the state. The structure and composition of Oregon’s forests differ considerably across the state, particularly east versus west of the Cascade Range. Western Oregon forests are dominated by higher productivity classes (85 to 224 cubic feet per acre annual growth)...

Weasels Mustelaspp. are specialized, small predators which demonstrate pronounced differences in size and social status according to sex and age, and these differences may manifest in spatial patterns including home range size and habitat selection. In forested North America, favored prey (voles; Microtusspp. and Myodesspp.) of short-tailed weasels Mustela ermineaoften reach high abundances in early stage forest, but availability of that cover type is limited where intensive plantation forestry occurs. We estimated home range size, including home range core area and arrangement, habitat...

Predators may limit populations of small carnivores indirectly through exploitative competition for resources, and directly through interference competition, including predation. We evaluated direct effects of predation by large predators on small, specialist carnivores by estimating annual survival and cause-specific mortality. We used known fate models to estimate annual survival of 23 radio-collared short-tailed weasels (Mustela erminea) in western Oregon in 2012–2013. Further, we reviewed published and unpublished studies of radio-tracked weasels (Mustela spp.) in North America, to...

There is worldwide interest in managing forests to improve biodiversity, enhance ecosystem services and assure long-term sustainability of forest resources. An increasingly important goal of forest management is to increase stand diversity and improve wildlife and aquatic habitat. Well-planned silvicultural systems containing a mixture of broadleaf-conifer species have potential to enhance stand diversity and provide other ecosystem services earlier than typical even-aged conifer plantations. Here, we use the example of mixed Sitka spruce/western hemlock and red alder in young, managed...