Treesearch

Public land management relies on accurate visitor counts in order to understand and mitigate environmental impacts and to quantify the value of ecosystem services provided by natural areas. We build and test predictive visitation models suitable for publicly-managed parks, open space, and other protected lands based on multiple sources of digital mobility data including geotagged posts to social media platforms, community science observations, and a mobile device location dataset from a commercial vendor. Using observational visitation data series from the United States’ National Park...

Increasing wildfire activity in mesic, temperate Pacific Northwest forests west of the Cascade Range crest has stimulated interest in understanding whether alternative forest management practices could reduce risk of stand-replacing fire. To explore how management can enhance fire resistance in these forests and assess tradeoffs among resistance enhancement, carbon sequestration and storage, and economic returns, we conducted 40-year simulations of stand development with BioSum, a framework for conducting landscape analysis with the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS), utilizing a statistical...

Increasing wildfire activity and uncharacteristically severe fires in fire-prone forests have intensified longstanding tensions between biodiversity conservation and wildfire risk reduction. In the Pacific Northwest, USA, fire exclusion has been practiced for over a century, driven largely by the perception of wildfire as a destructive force to be minimized. Over the past 35 years, northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) conservation has emphasized the protection of closed-canopy, structurally complex, older forests, which are habitat conditions associated with long-term populatio...

Planting a mixture of species during reforestation is of increasing interest, underlying a need to quantify the long-term effects of mixtures on stand development for a wide array of species. Here we report on ∼40 year response of three dual species mixture trials at a moderate quality site in Washington, USA where coast Douglas-fir (DF, Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii) was grown at 3 m spacing in a 50:50 mix with either western hemlock (WH, Tsuga heterophylla), noble fir (NF, Abies procera) or western white pine (WWP, Pinus monticola). Stand metrics were compared for each trial...

Nonnative carp were spotted nearly 75 years ago in eastern Oregon’s Malheur Lake and have subsequently fully colonized the lake and surrounding wetlands, compromising water quality and the growth of native aquatic vegetation eaten by resident and migratory waterfowl. Eradication efforts have proven challenging; only a few carp are needed for the population to rebound. Managers at Malheur Lake are not alone in dealing with this invasive fish; aquatic managers elsewhere in the country face similar issues. Following a Carp Control Workshop in 2010, Jason Dunham, a researcher with the U.S....

The biogeography of irruptive insect herbivores is determined by host availability and climate conditions. As such, outbreak distributions are sensitive to climatic change, especially across large latitudinal gradients. Here, we investigate the outbreak distributions of two understudied defoliators, hemlock sawfly Neodiprion tsugae (Hymenoptera) and western blackheaded budworm Acleris gloverana (Lepidoptera), that have both recently impacted the greatest land area recorded across the Pacific coastal temperate rainforest since the establishment of aerial survey programs. We compiled...

As the impacts of drought intensify with climate change, adaptation to drought is becoming an increasingly important consideration for tree breeding and forest management. This elevates the need to understand how breeding for faster growth affects drought tolerance and if breeding to improve drought tolerance could help mitigate the impacts of drought on forest health and productivity. To understand the implications for tree breeding in future climates, we studied how selective breeding of western larch (Larix occidentalis) for faster growth affects drought resistance (a component of...

Establishing riparian zones to protect fish has been a standard forest management practice in western Oregon and Washington for decades. But to effectively place these zones, one needs to know where fish are living. Brooke Penaluna, a research fisheries biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, has led the development of a new model that predicts the presence of fish more accurately than previous models or other methods, which relied heavily on electrofishing— a labor-intensive method of manually surveying streams. Her new model,...

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to the abrupt suspension of cruise ship visits under the U.S. Center for Disease Control’s “No Sail Order” resulting in loss of jobs and revenues for coastal communities of Southeast Alaska. We conducted case studies in three Southeast Alaska communities to learn how they responded to the abrupt loss of cruise tourism and to the economic and social challenges of COVID-19. Through data gathered in focus groups and convenience surveys, we ascertained the strategies that sustained households, businesses, and cultures amid the health threat and economic...

Site index is frequently used for deciding how to manage stands, however, it often omits or fails to accurately characterize the site-dependent growth of young (ages ≤8 years) trees. This early stage of development is a critical period in a rotation during which important management decisions with the potential to influence all future growth are made. To address this, we developed a new index of site quality for young, coastal Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco var. menziesii) stands in western Washington, USA. We used high-density light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scans...