Treesearch

The Marbled Murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) is federally threatened in part of its range in western North America. Information on density and productivity is important for managing populations. Over an 18-yr period, we monitored murrelet density and productivity ratios during the breeding season along 170 km of shoreline of the San Juan Islands, Washington, USA. While murrelets occur throughout the coastal marine waters of Washington, the San Juan Islands support higher densities of murrelets during the breeding season than most other areas. From 1995 to 2012, the average density of...

Provides current information on lumber and plywood production and prices; employment in the forest industries; international trade in logs, lumber, and plywood; volume and average prices of stumpage sold by public agencies; and other related items. Current data and downloadable Excel files are available online.

Cropping system diversity can help build greater agroecosystem resilience by suppressing insect, weed, and disease pressures while also mitigating effects of extreme and more variable weather. Despite the potential benefits of cropping systems diversity, few farmers in the US Corn Belt use diverse rotations. This study examines factors that may influence farmers’ decisions to use more diversified crop rotations in the US Corn Belt through a parallel convergent mixed methods approach, using a multi-level analysis of Corn Belt farmer survey data (n = 4,778) and in-depth interviews (n = 159)....

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...

Increasing evidence that pervasive warming trends are altering disturbance regimes and their interactions with fire has generated substantial interest and debate over the implications of these changes. Previous work has primarily focused on conditions that promote non-additive interactions of linked and compounded disturbances, but the spectrum of potential interaction patterns has not been fully considered. Here we develop and define terminology, expand on the existing conceptual framework and review the patterns and mechanisms of disturbance interactions with a focus on interactions...

Hand-constructed piles in eastern Washington and north-central New Mexico were weighed periodically between October 2011 and June 2015 to develop decay-rate constants that are useful for estimating the rate of piled biomass loss over time. Decay-rate constants (k) were determined by fitting negative exponential curves to time series of pile weight for each site. Piles at the Washington site (k = 0.027/year) decomposed significantly more slowly than piles at the New Mexico site (k = 0.064/year). Significant differences in k for each site may be a function of a between-site variation in pile...

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...