Treesearch

Forest disturbances are increasing in extent and intensity, annually altering the structure and function of affected systems across millions of acres. Land managers need rapid assessment tools that can be used to characterize disturbance events across space and to meet forest planning needs. Unlike vegetation management projects and wildfire events, which typically are well documented, there is often insufficient data on the extent and intensity of insect and disease outbreaks during periods between intensive inventories. This report describes a rapid assessment approach using normalized...

A diverse workforce in science can bring about competitive advantages, innovation, and new knowledge, skills, and experiences for understanding complex problems involving the science and management of natural resources. In particular, fisheries sciences confronts exceptional challenges because of complicated societal-level problems from the overexploitation and degradation of aquatic ecosystems worldwide. Here, we examine the status of gender and race or ethnicity among the US fisheries science workforce on the basis of a survey of 498 faculty members from 56 institutions of higher...

The sourcing of food plays a significant role in assessing the sustainability of a city, but it is unclear how much food a city can produce within its city limits. In this study, we propose a method for estimating the maximum food crop production capacity of a city and demonstrate the method in Seattle, WA USA by taking into account land use, the light environment, and a mix of food crops necessary to supply a year-round vegetarian diet. By artificially removing trees from the city, we estimate the effect of tree shading on food crop production capacity. We find that at maximum food...

tManagement of ecological conditions and processes in multiownership landscapes requires cooperationby diverse stakeholder groups. The structure of organizational networks – the extent to which networksallow for interaction among organizations within and across ideological and geographic boundaries –can indicate potential opportunities for cooperation on landscape-scale problems. In the arid landscapesof the western United States, where increasingly large wildfires burn irrespective of property boundariesand land designations, organizations involved in the restoration of forests and the...

Intensive management practices are commonly used to increase fiber production from forests, but potential tradeoffs with maintenance of long-term productivity and early successional biodiversity have yet to be quantified. We assessed soil and vegetation responses in replicated manipulations of logging debris (LD; either retained or removed) and competing vegetation control (VC; either initial or sustained annually for 5 years) for 10 years at two Douglas-fir sites that contrasted strongly in availability of soil nutrients and water. We evaluated (1) survival and growth of Douglas-fir to...

To detect and avoid illegal logging of valuable tree species, identification methods for the origin of timber are necessary. We used next-generation sequencing to identify chloroplast genome regions that differentiate the origin of white oaks from the three continents; Asia, Europe, and North America. By using the chloroplast genome of Asian Q. mongolica as a reference, we identified 861 variant sites (672 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs); 189 insertion/deletion (indel) polymorphism) from representative species of three continents (Q. mongolica from Asia; Q. petraea and Q. robur from...

Since 1960, the Forest Service has been guided by the multiple-use concept, which recognizes five major uses for public lands—timber, water, range, recreation, and fish and wildlife habitat—and mandates that all five should be equally considered in management plans. In recent decades, however, it has become evident that people also value many other benefits offered by the natural world, such as support for indigenous cultures and sustainable communities, protection for endangered species, and carbon sequestration. The “ecosystem services” concept has emerged as a way to describe a much...

Increasingly, objectives for forests with moderate- or mixed-severity fire regimes are to restore successionally diverse landscapes that are resistant and resilient to current and future stressors. Maintaining native species and characteristic processes requires this successional diversity, but methods to achieve it are poorly explained in the literature. In the Inland Pacific US, large, old, early seral trees were a key historical feature of many young and old forest successional patches, especially where fires frequently occurred. Large, old trees are naturally fire-tolerant, but today...

Forest ecosystems are removing significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Both abiotic resource availability and biotic interactions during forest succession affect C accumulation rates and maximum C stocks. However, the timing and controls on the peak and decline in C accumulation rates as stands age, trees increase in size, and canopy gaps become prevalent are not well-understood. Our study examines measured change in live and dead woody C pools from 8767 inventory plots on 9.1 million ha of Pacific Northwest National Forest lands to determine how the balance of tree growth,...

Much of the water supply in the Pacific Northwest originates in national forests. It sustains the region’s aquatic ecosystems, agriculture, hydroelectric power, and community water supplies. Understanding how climate change will affect water supply is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Substantial changes are projected in the types of precipitation (rain vs. snow) that will fall in the region, as are smaller, but potentially important, changes in the total annual precipitation. Combined with earlier snowmelt, these changes could cause decreased summer streamflows, and some...