Treesearch

The breadth of management goals in large and complex landscapes encompasses biotic communities with diverse life histories. However, managing multiple communities may be challenging when resource requirements overlap, like forage for ungulates and floral resources for bees. For three years in a riparian forest in northeastern Oregon, USA, we manipulated the presence of wild deer and elk, domestic cattle, and the combination of wild and domestic ungulates, to understand the separate and cumulative influence of grazing by different functional feeding guilds on bloom and bee communities....

White-nose syndrome (WNS), caused by the fungal pathogen Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd), has led to widespread declines in tricolored bat (Perimyotis subflavus) populations across the eastern United States. Management actions have largely focused on increasing overwinter survival rates of Pd-infected bats through directly manipulating hibernacula. Maintenance of high-quality active-season habitat is also an important component of bat population recovery because it can result in higher body fat composition during the overwintering period and therefore increase survival rates of individual...

Invasive predators are leading drivers of native species decline, and their impact is heaviest where they concentrate in the habitats native species most depend on. The barred owl (Strix varia) is a generalist predator invading old forests across western North America. Using GPS telemetry of 56 barred owls across the range of the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) in northwestern California, we found consistent selection for an old-forest axis integrating high canopy cover, tall stands, large trees, diverse tree sizes, and old age. Because these attributes define old forest,...

The Appalachian Mountains in eastern North America are a global biodiversity hotspot for woodland salamanders (genus Plethodon) and contain many range-restricted species endemic to areas of high elevation. Previous research indicates that interspecific competition could exert a strong influence on geographic distribution boundaries and local occurrence probabilities for high-elevation salamanders, but competition dynamics have not been assessed for most species. We investigated co-occurrence and competition dynamics between 2 large woodland salamanders that occur on Shenandoah Mountain in...

Progressively more intense and frequent forest fires in western North America have led to higher demand for active fuels management activities. The most common method to manage fuel loads in western forests is fuels reduction thinning. Concurrently, growing evidence highlights the importance of forests as valuable habitat for native bees. However, the effects of fuels reduction thinning on bees are not well understood in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), United States. We examined how thinning affected native blooming plant and bee communities by conducting a before-after, control-impact (BACI)...

Passive acoustic monitoring is widely used in conservation but often limited by delayed results due to manual retrieval and post‐processing. To explore the feasibility of real‐time monitoring in remote landscapes, we conducted field evaluations of a prototype automated surveying unit (ASU). The ASU integrated onboard convolutional neural network‐based sound classification with satellite data transmission for near real‐time species detection. We deployed ASUs alongside conventional autonomous recording units at eight sites to survey for northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) and...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Oregon. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all the...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Oregon. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all the...

Most research into post-fire geomorphology has been conducted in regions with frequent fire, such as in dry Mediterranean and temperate climates and less has been conducted in wet forests where wildfire is now expanding with climate change. Because climate, soils, topography, vegetation, management legacies and fire history influence post-fire geomorphic processes, research into post-fire erosion and debris flow hazards across a broader set of climatologies is needed. The western Pacific Northwest (wPNW) of the United States is susceptible to multiple types of post-fire debris flows (i.e....

Buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare) is a perennial bunchgrass, invasive in arid ecosystems of the United States, Australia, and Mexico. Buffelgrass invasion detrimentally affects ecosystems, but it is unclear how the amount of invasion affects ecological impact. Here, we investigated how buffelgrass abundance affects: plant diversity, aboveground biomass carbon, and surface soil (0-10 cm) carbon. We established 13 plots in unburned areas, across a range of buffelgrass cover (0-68%) in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, USA. Shannon diversity decreased significantly with buffelgrass cover....