Treesearch

Background - Modern land management faces unprecedented uncertainty regarding future climates, novel disturbance regimes, and unanticipated ecological feedbacks. Mitigating this uncertainty requires a cohesive landscape management strategy that utilizes multiple methods to optimize benefits while hedging risks amidst uncertain futures. We used a process-based landscape simulation model (LANDIS-II) to forecast forest management, growth, climate effects, and future wildfire dynamics, and we distilled results using a decision support tool allowing us to examine tradeoffs between alternative...

Climate change and fire management actions are the two key drivers of fire regime changes now and into the future. The predicted effects of these drivers vary between regions and global climate projections; however, it is expected that fire regimes globally are likely to intensify. Increased wildfire extent, frequency and severity mean impacts to people, property, infrastructure, production and the environment are also likely to increase under worsening climate conditions. Fire management programs aim to reduce the influence of worsening climatic conditions on wildfires and risk to assets...

Recent advances in bioacoustics combined with acoustic individual identification (AIID) could open frontiers for ecological and evolutionary research because traditional methods of identifying individuals are invasive, expensive, labor-intensive, and potentially biased. Despite overwhelming evidence that most taxa have individual acoustic signatures, the application of AIID remains challenging and uncommon. Furthermore, the methods most commonly used for AIID are not compatible with many potential AIID applications. Deep learning in adjacent disciplines suggests opportunities to advance...

Riverine export of carbon (C) is an important part of the global C cycle; however, most riverine C budgets focus on individual forms of C and fail to comprehensively measure both organic and inorganic C species in concert. To address this knowledge gap, we conducted high frequency sampling of multiple C forms, including dissolved organic C (DOC), inorganic carbon (as alkalinity), particulate organic C (POC), coarse particulate organic C (CPOC), and invertebrate biomass C across the main run-off season in a predominantly rain-fed watershed in Southeast Alaska. Streamwater concentrations...

In response to achieving the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework Target 3, specifically for conserving at least 30 per cent of inland water areas through a combination of protected areas and OECMs, while recognizing Indigenous and traditional territories, the inlands water community has been developing resources to achieve inland waters conservation outcomes. This document adds to this collection, focusing on OECMs in the inland waters context to achieve inland water conservation outcomes and ensure that more momentum, tools, and resources are leveraged towards effective inland...

This is the executive summary for the report, Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptation in Coastal Oregon, by Halofsky et al. (2024, PNW-GTR-1024). The vulnerability assessment was developed by a science-management partnership consisting of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (Siuslaw National Forest, Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, Cascade Head Experimental Forest, Pacific Northwest Region, Pacific Northwest Research Station) and Northwest Climate Hub; U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (Northwest Oregon District and Coos Bay District); and...

The diversity of freshwater species is declining faster than the diversity of species in the oceans or on land. Many of these freshwater aquatic species live in and around waterways that pass through national forests and other federal land. Habitat management is key for these species to persist, but to do that effectively, resource managers need information about where the species live and potential current and future threats. Rebecca Flitcroft, a research fish biologist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, led an effort to comprehensively classify and map all...

We describe the latest version of the NASA Earth eXchange Downscaled Climate Projections 30 arcseconds (NEX-DCP30-CMIP6). The archive contains downscaled historical and future projections for 1950–2100 based on output from Phase 6 of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). The downscaled products were produced using a daily variant of the monthly bias correction/spatial disaggregation (BCSD) method and are at 30-arcsecond horizontal resolution. Four variables (maximum temperature, minimum temperature, precipitation, and vapour pressure) from five CMIP6 experiments (historical,...

The Oregon Coast Adaptation Partnership (OCAP) was developed to identify climate change issues relevant for resource management on federal lands (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service; U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management) in coastal Oregon. This science-management partnership assessed the vulnerability of natural resources to climate change and developed adaptation options that minimize negative impacts of climate change and facilitate transition of ecosystems to a warmer climate. The vulnerability assessment focused on climate, water resources, fisheries,...

A two-stage hierarchical Bayesian model is developed and implemented to estimate forest biomass density and total given sparsely sampled LiDAR and georeferenced forest inventory plot measurements. The model is motivated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) objective to provide biomass estimates for the remote Tanana Inventory Unit (TIU) in interior Alaska. The proposed model yields stratum-level biomass estimates for arbitrarily sized areas. Model-based estimates are compared with the TIU FIA design-based post-stratified...