Treesearch

Human disturbances dominate national forests and grasslands and affect habitats and species in multifaceted ways. In the past, planning and management efforts focused mainly on the management activities of silviculture, prescribed fire, and livestock grazing. Those disturbances remain as common agents to monitor and evaluate. A variety of additional human disturbances, however, are now prevalent and deserve attention, including roads and traffic, recreation, energy extraction, urban expansion, and nonnative or invasive species. Monitoring and evaluating the most prevalent human disturbances...

Information about status and trend of wildlife habitat is important for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service to accomplish its mission and meet its legal requirements. As the steward of 193 million acres (ac) of Federal land, the Forest Service needs to evaluate the status of wildlife habitat and how it compares with desired conditions. Habitat monitoring programs provide information to meet the needs of the agency while fostering use of standardized, integrated approaches to produce robust knowledge. This technical guide provides current, scientifically credible, and...

Information about status and trend of wildlife habitat is important for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service to accomplish its mission and meet its legal requirements. As the steward of 193 million acres (ac) of Federal land, the Forest Service needs to evaluate the status of wildlife habitat and how it compares with desired conditions. Habitat monitoring programs provide information to meet the needs of the agency while fostering use of standardized, integrated approaches to produce robust knowledge. This technical guide provides current, scientifically credible, and...

Vegetation composition and structure are key components of wildlife habitat (Mc- Comb et al. 2010, Morrison et al. 2006) and are, therefore, essential components of all wildlife habitat monitoring. The objectives of this chapter are to describe common habitat attributes derived from vegetation composition and structure and to provide guidance for obtaining and using existing and new vegetation data to monitor wildlife habitat. We begin this chapter by addressing key concepts relevant to monitoring vegetation. Next, we describe each of the common habitat attributes associated with vegetation...

Development owing to population increases over the last 30 years has greatly affected forested lands in the United States. To assess and compare increases in development, we counted changes in the number of structures on a systematic grid of photointerpreted points around public forest land in Washington and Oregon. Areas bordering public forest land are showing substantial increases in development, with the number of structures on private lands near almost all types of public forest more than doubling between the 1970s and 2000s. Lands bordering Washington’s Department of Natural Resources...

This report summarizes practical energy management strategies that could help communities in southeast Alaska move closer to energy independence while utilizing local resources more effectively. Our analysis focuses primarily on Sitka, Alaska, yet could be relevant to other communities having similar energy structures that rely primarily on hydroelectric power. We consider how community energy capacity and locally abundant resources can help communities move toward energy independence. Our recommendations focus on energy conservation, appropriately scaled renewable energy project developmen...

In 1992, the marbled murrelet population in the Pacific Northwest was listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act, along with the northern spotted owl and Pacific salmon. These designations were embodied in the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, which takes an ecosystem approach to managing about 25 million acres of federal lands, with a goal of maintaining and restoring these species’ habitats and populations. Scientists with the Pacific Northwest and Pacific Southwest Research Stations as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Washington State Department of Fish and...

The hydraulic resilience of a species is determined by multiple physiological and structural traits. Understanding how these traits are integrated at the organismal level to yield adequate hydraulic fitness in a given environment would be a fertile area for future research. This type of information is essential for realistic predictions of species hydraulic limits under current and future climate change scenarios.