Treesearch

The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) was developed to resolve debates over old-growth forests, endangered species, and timber production on federal forests in the range of the northern spotted owl. This three-volume science synthesis, which consists of 12 chapters that address various ecological and social concerns, is intended to inform forest plan revision and forest management within the NWFP area. Land managers with the U.S. Forest Service provided questions that helped guide preparation of the synthesis, which builds on the 10-, 15-, and 20-year NWFP monitoring reports and synthesizes...

The worldwide decline of large carnivores is concerning, particularly given the important roles they play in shaping ecosystems and conserving biodiversity. Estimating the capacity of an ecosystem to support a large carnivore population is essential for establishing reasonable and quantifiable recovery goals, determining how population recovery may rely on connectivity, and determining the feasibility of investing limited public resources toward recovery. We present a case study that synthesized advances in habitat selection and spatiallyexplicit individual-based population modeling, while...

We assessed the association between the natural environment and asthma in 49,956 New Zealand children born in 1998 and followed up until 2016 using routinely collected data. Children who lived in greener areas, as measured by the normalized difference vegetation index, were less likely to be asthmatic: a 1 s.d. increase in normalized difference vegetation index was associated with a 6.0% (95% CI 1.9–9.9%) lower risk of asthma. Vegetation diversity was also protective: a 1 s.d. increase in the number of natural land-cover types in a child’s residential meshblock was associated with a 6.7%...

Yellow-cedar, Callitropsis nootkatensis, is prevalent in coastal forests of southeast Alaska, western Canada, and inland forests along the Cascades to northern California, USA. These trees have few microbial or animal pests, attributable in part to the distinct groups of biologically active secondary metabolites their tissues store for chemical defense. Here we summarize the new yellow-cedar compounds identified and their biological activities, plus new or expanded activities for tissues, extracts, essential oils and previously known compounds since the last review more than 40 years ago....

Past research demonstrating the importance plant–microbe interactions as drivers of ecosystem succession has focused on how plants condition soil microbial communities, impacting subsequent plant performance and plant community assembly. These studies, however, largely treat microbial communities as a black box. In this study, we sought to examine how emblematic shifts from early successional Alnus viridus ssp. sinuata (Sitka alder) to late successional Picea sitchensis (Sitka spruce) in primary succession may be reflected in specific belowground changes in bacterial community structure...

We examined plant community organization over the first five growing seasons after clearcut harvesting with retention of two levels of logging debris (light and heavy) and application of four vegetation control treatments (non-sprayed control, aminopyralid (A), triclopyr (T), and A+T). Our study site was 44 km northwest of Olympia, WA., USA, and before forest harvesting it was dominated byPseudotsuga menziesii. We used a randomized split plot experimental design replicated in 6 blocks (each debris-treatment main plot had four herbicide-treatment split plots). We estimated percent canopy...

Warming temperatures are projected to greatly alter many forests in the Pacific Northwest. MC2 is a dynamic global vegetation model, a climate-aware, process-based, and gridded vegetation model. We calibrated and ran MC2 simulations for the Blue Mountains Ecoregion, Oregon, USA, at 30 arc-second spatial resolution. We calibrated MC2 using the best available spatial datasets from land managers. We ran future simulations using climate projections from four global circulation models (GCM) under representative concentration pathway 8.5. Under this scenario, forest productivity is projected to...