Treesearch

Ecosystem services are increasingly recognized as a way of framing and describing the broad suite of benefits that people receive from forests. The USDA Forest Service has been exploring use of an ecosystem services framework to describe forest values provided by federal lands and to attract and build partnerships with stakeholders to implement projects. Recently, the agency has sought placed-based applications of the ecosystem services framework to national forest management to better illustrate the concept for policymakers, managers and forest stakeholders. This framework includes...

Ecosystem services consistently group together both spatially and cognitively into “bundles”. Understanding socio-economic predictors of these bundles is essential to informing a management approach that emphasizes equitable distribution of ecosystem services. We received 1796 completed surveys from stakeholders of the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest (WA, USA) using both in-person workshops and an online platform. Survey respondents rated the importance of 26 ecosystem services. Subsequent analysis revealed six distinct preference bundles of these services: environmental quality,...

The lethal temperature limit is 60 degrees Celsius (°C) for plant tissues, including trees, with lower temperatures causing heat stress. As fire injury increases on tree stems, there is an accompanying rise in tissue ethanol concentrations, physiologically linked to impaired mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation energy production. We theorize that sublethal tissue temperatures of 30°C to 60°C cause physiological changes to (a) oxygen supply, (b) membrane function, or (c) enzyme activity that individually or simultaneously create stress by impairing aerobic respiration and inducing...

Water temperatures fluctuate in time and space, creating diverse thermal regimes on river networks. Temporal variability in these thermal landscapes has important biological and ecological consequences because of nonlinearities in physiological reactions; spatial diversity in thermal landscapes provides aquatic organisms with options to maximize growth and survival. However, human activities and climate change threaten to alter the dynamics of riverine thermal regimes. New data and tools can identify particular facets of the thermal landscape that describe ecological and management...

Surveys for red tree vole (Arborimus longicaudus) nests require tree climbing because the species is a highly specialized arboreal rodent that live in the tree canopy of coniferous forests in western Oregon and northwestern California. Tree voles are associated with old coniferous forest (≥80 years old) that are structurally complex, but are often found in young forests (<80 years old) especially in unthinned young forests adjacent to old forest. Throughout much of their range tree voles primarily forage and nest in Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and occasionally in grand fir (Abies...

Our lack of knowledge on the spatiotemporal drivers of the distribution of many freshwater fishes, particularly as they differ among life-history stages, is a challenge to conservation of these species. We used 2-stage hurdle models to investigate drivers of occurrence and abundance of locally threatened adult and juvenile Northern River Blackfish in the upper Condamine River, Queensland, Australia. Different processes drive occurrence and abundance between the 2 life-history stages. Both adult and juvenile occurrences were negatively associated with high-magnitude, extended warming...

This study assesses the understory plant response and associated effects on forage resources available to Sitka black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus sitkensis), to the creation of artificial canopy gaps in a young-growth forest stand in the coastal temperate rain forest of southeast Alaska. The forest stand was approximately 58 years old when gaps were created and approximately 81 years old when the most recent set of data was collected in 2013. Plant canopy cover estimates were collected five times over the 23-year period following the creation of nine artificial canopy gaps. We...

Understanding and estimating inbreeding is essential for managing threatened and endangered wildlife populations. However, determination of inbreeding rates in natural populations is confounded by incomplete parentage information. We present an approach for quantifying inbreeding rates for populations with incomplete parentage information. The approach exploits knowledge of pedigree configurations that lead to inbreeding coefficients of F = 0.25 and F = 0.125, allowing for quantification of Pr(I|k): the probability of observing pedigree I given the fraction of known parents (k). We...

Water temperature can have a profound influence on development and distribution of aquatic species. Salmon are particularly vulnerable to temperature changes because their reproductive and early development life phases are spent in freshwater river systems where temperature fluctuates widely both daily and seasonally. Flow regulation downstream of dams can also cause temperature regime changes, which in turn may spur local adaptation of early life-history traits. In a common garden laboratory incubation experiment, we exposed spring Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) embryos to four...

Large trees are the most prominent structural features of old-growth forests, which are considered to be globally important carbon sinks. Because of their large size, estimates of biomass and growth of large trees are often based on ground-level measurements (e.g., diameter at breast height, DBH) and little is known about growth dynamics within the crown. As trees increase in size, growth of the crown may not be reflected in DBH measurements contributing to inaccuracy of aboveground forest productivity. Here we present data from a 10-yr re-measurement of crown structure and branch/trunk...