Treesearch

The ecosystem services (ES) approach entails integrating people into public forest management and managing to meet their needs and wants. Managers must find ways to understand what these needs are and how they are met. In this study, we used small group discussions, in a case study of the Deschutes National Forest, to involve community members and forest staff in determining what and how people benefit from forests. We compare results with the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) classification. Results show that people identified benefits in many of the same ways and categories as in the...

In recent years, substantial progress has been made for handling missing data issues for applications in forest ecology and management, particularly in the area of imputation techniques. A session on this topic was held at the XXlll IUFRO World Congress in Seoul, South Korea, on August 23-28, 2010, resulting in this special issue of six papers that address recent advances and applications in imputation methods and related modeling techniques. In this issue, the authors of the six papers explore recent advances in this emerging field.

Dwarf mistletoes (Arceuthobium species) influence many processes within forested ecosystems, but few studies have examined their distribution in relation to climate. An analysis of 1549 forested plots within a 14.5 million ha region of southeast Alaska provided strong indications that climate currently limits hemlock dwarf mistletoe (Arceuthobium tsugense (Rosendahl) G.N. Jones) to a subset of the range of its primary tree host, western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.), with infection varying from a high of 20% of trees at sea level to only 5% by 200 m elevation. Three types of...

Management of federal public forests to meet sustainability goals and multiple use regulations is an immense challenge. To succeed, we suggest use of formal decision science procedures and tools in the context of structured decision making (SDM). SDM entails four stages: problem structuring (framing the problem and defining objectives and evaluation criteria), problem analysis (defining alternatives, evaluating likely consequences, identifying key uncertainties, and analyzing tradeoffs), decision point (identifying the preferred alternative), and implementation and monitoring the preferred...

Destruction of homes and businesses from Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) fires have been steadily escalating as have the fire suppression costs associated with them. Since 2000, in the U.S. over 3,000 homes per year are lost to WUI fires, compared to about 900 homes in the 1990s, and 400 homes in the 1970s. In 2011, in Texas alone, over 2,000 homes were destroyed during WUI fires. The WUI fire problem affects both existing communities and new construction. In the U.S, the problem is most acute in the western and southern states; however, WUI fires have also recently destroyed homes in the...

A stand of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) severely affected by Armillaria root disease was treated with five different levels of sanitation by root removal to reduce root disease losses in the regenerating stand. Treatments included the following: (1) all trees pushed over by machine, maximum removal of roots by machine ripping, and visible remaining roots removed by hand; (2) all trees pushed over by machine and maximum removal of roots by machine ripping; (3) all trees pushed over by machine with no further removal of roots; (4) smaller trees pushed over by machine but large stumps...

The inherent spatial and temporal heterogeneity of fuel beds in forests of the southeastern United States may require fine scale fuel measurements for providing reliable fire hazard and fuel treatment effectiveness estimates. In a series of five papers, an intensive, fine scale fuel inventory from the Savanna River Site in the southeastern United States is used for building fuel beds and mapping fire behavior potential, evaluating fuel treatment options for effectiveness, and providing a comparative analysis of landscape modeled fire behavior using three different data sources including...

Advances in the application of stable isotopes have allowed the quantitative evaluation of previously cryptic ecological processes. In particular, researchers have utilized the predictable spatial patterning in natural abundance of isotopes to better understand animal dispersal and migration. However, quantifying dispersal via natural abundance alone has proven to be of limited utility for species exhibiting short- or mid-distance dispersal events, including most mammalian species. In previous experimental work, we demonstrated that consumption of 1 dose of isotopically enriched baits...

This is a report of the First International Symposium on Ranaviruses held on July 8, 2011 in conjunction with the annual Joint Meeting of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (JMIH) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. The emerging threat of ranavirus infectious diseases to the global biodiversity of ectothermic vertebrates was addressed by 23 scientists from nine countries with expertise in ecology, pathology, virology, veterinary medicine and immunology.

Co-occurring species often have different strategies for tolerating daily cycles of water stress. One underlying parameter that can link together the suite of traits that enables a given strategy is wood density. Here we compare hydraulic traits of two pioneer species from a tropical forest in Panama that differ in wood density: Miconia argentea and Anacardium excelsum. As hypothesized, the higher wood density of Miconia was associated with smaller diameter vessels and fibers, more water stress-resistant leaves and stems, and roughly half the capacitance of the lower wood density Anacardium...