Treesearch

Recovery of rare and imperiled species is often supported by targeting the dynamic drivers of abundance patterns. However, knowledge of these drivers can be obscured by challenges stemming from species detectability and autocorrelated data. Longfin Smelt (Spirinchus thaleichthys) in the San Francisco Bay-Delta have become rare as the result of dramatic declines in abundance. Abundance indices from a multitude of surveys in the Bay-Delta have documented these declines, but utilizing survey data to support recovery has been more challenging. To elucidate the spatiotemporal drivers of Longfin...

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) preserves and provides U.S. federal government records of historic and cultural value, including approximately 200,000 reels of 35 mm black-and-white motion picture film. Of immediate concern is allocating finite resources over a 5-year program to preserve the most at-risk, frequently used, and valuable films. To aid this need, we developed a decision-modeling approach based on film deterioration and acidity conditions, known or anticipated access requests, archival value, and other attributes. We used a Bayesian network parameterized...

Understanding how indirect effects of climate can interact with density-dependent processes has become increasingly important as variability changes resource availability for wildlife. Both climate and animal density can drive the abundance of vegetation and control the degree of competition for forage between ungulates. Further, climate-density relationships may be more pronounced for females in the population as they may need to compensate nutritionally for the energetic costs of raising young. Quantifying the effects of these relationships on individual animal performance is challenging...

Legacies of land use can persist for decades, thereby impacting populations, communities, and ecosystems long after the original disturbance has concluded. The coastal rainforests of western North America were fundamentally transformed by commercial logging throughout the 20th century, resulting in depauperate second-growth forests that provide limited understory production and foraging habitat for herbivores. The Tongass National Forest in Alaska, USA, is the largest contiguous tract of coastal temperate rainforest in the world, but nearly 200,000 ha of second-growth forest have created a...

Native bees are diverse and efficient pollinators that have been studied in many forested regions of the United States. However, such studies are rare in the inland Pacific Northwest. To address this gap, we examined 1) how blooming plant and bee communities differed between two forest types (warm-dry and cool-moist) in spring and summer and 2) how a suite of environmental conditions influenced these communities each season. We collected 4,469 bees from 122 species/morphospecies over two years. Bees were typically twice as abundant in warm-dry versus cool-moist forests. In addition, bloom...

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has revolutionized wildlife monitoring by lowering barriers associated with data collection. Data from PAM can support adaptive management programs aimed at meeting multiple objectives in the face of uncertainty. Pairing PAM with acoustic classifiers capable of identifying sounds produced by wildlife can generate thousands of species detections across managed landscapes. However, such species detections represent both true- and false-positive detections, and human review is required to generate accurate detection data. Although collecting audio recordings...

Managers grappling with questions about dead wood in productive, often high-volume, westside Pacific Northwest forests seek to balance wildlife habitat quality and fire hazard reduction, especially following wildfires which can both consume and generate exceptional quantities of dead wood. Longitudinal analysis of a large (n = 327) sample of permanent forest inventory monitoring plots measured before and repeatedly after wildfires and an equal-sized sample of comparable but unburned reference plots revealed post-fire trajectories of dead wood and factors that drive abundance of snags,...

Community-based collaboration has been touted as an effective model for forest governance because it promotes democratized decision-making and stakeholder engagement to address landscape-scale problems. Forest collaboratives are assumed to be heterogeneous, consisting of stakeholders with a diverse range of interests. Few studies have systematically explored variables associated with collaborative composition. We identify six elements of collaborative composition for investigation: size, stakeholder diversity, balance, locality–diversity, core attendance, and cross-participation. This...

(1) Background: Analyses using participatory GIS (PGIS) data have primarily focused on reporting landscape values (e.g., subsistence, spiritual) or activities (e.g., hunting, meditation) and less frequently on identifying patterns of value and activity co-occurrence. This paper explores whether consistent combinations of landscape values and activities associated with meaningful places identified by visitors—referred to as “bundles”—emerge across protected areas. These bundles represent the cognitive-behavioral components of sense of place. (2) Methods: We used exploratory factor analysis...

Wildfires have the potential to profoundly alter forest structure, which can leave land managers with severe information gaps when making post-fire forest management decisions. We assess point clouds derived from aerial lidar (16.8 points/m²) and digital aerial photogrammetry (DAP, 13.9 points/m²) for the purposes of generating post-fire forest attribute maps using 82 permanent field plots. Low-cost aerial lidar and DAP data can enable predictive mapping after fires occur, and an assessment of the utility of DAP in this context is warranted given its lower cost. We evaluated the performance...