Treesearch

Approaches to forest management have changed markedly in the Pacific Northwest in recent decades, yet legacies of past management persist on the landscape. Following clearcut logging, woody residues were typically burned to reduce future fire hazard, create planting spots, facilitate natural recruitment, and retard growth of competing vegetation. We asked whether legacies of broadcast burning persist in the forest understory during the early stages of stand closure, how they manifest structurally or compositionally, whether they are altered by subsequent management (pre-commercial thinning)...

Human settlement has historically degraded floodplains and valley floors by introducing structures, such as dikes and dams, to control water flow and steer flooding away from areas where people live and work. In the past decade, land managers in the Pacific Northwest have devised projects to reconnect rivers with their floodplains. They’ve designed these projects to increase the abundance and diversity of freshwater organisms by increasing habitat complexity. To further understand this new rehabilitation method, scientists from the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station...

Public lands are an important source of outdoor recreation opportunities. These opportunities provide a variety of public benefits, including promoting physical and mental well-being, contributing to local economies, and raising conservation awareness. In response to current and potential demand, it is ever more important to meet and anticipate infrastructure and user needs. With aging infrastructure (e.g., trails, access points, parking lots), managers face the need to maintain ex­isting, and establish new, recreation opportunities to meet user expectations and contribute to positive...

We propose the core collaborative community science framework, an original conceptual framework that integrates and modifies best practices from community science and collective impact groups to support investigations of environmental health and justice. The core collaborative community science framework differs from more typical frameworks for community science, which often frame projects as static and either scientist or community led; these framings can limit the potential for co-production and action-oriented models of science. Frameworks are lacking to help community science collaborat...

United States federal lands are managed for multiple conservation, social, and commercial goals shaped by the visions of diverse interest groups. The rural economic and food-security needs of local public-lands-based communities have important implications for sustainable natural-resource management but can be obscured by national-scale public comment processes. To better understand local concerns and aspirations for management of the nation’s largest national forest, the Tongass, we use thematic analysis of public testimonies provided by Southeast Alaska community members as part of the...

Exposure to urban trees is associated with improved public health outcomes, including healthier infant birth weights, fewer symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and decreased cardiovascular mortality. Conversely, tree loss is linked to increased rates of cardiovascular disease and higher mortality. Could this mean that trees save lives? Using 30 years of tree planting data generated by Friends of Trees, a nonprofit organization that has planted trees throughout Portland, Oregon, researchers with the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and colleagues...

The melting cryosphere adds heterogeneity to the abiotic and biotic characteristics of many high latitude and montane rivers. However, climate change threatens the cryosphere's persistence in many regions. While existing research has explored the impacts of cryospheric loss on the diversity and structure of freshwater communities, implications for functional traits of communities, such as production of aquatic invertebrates, remain unresolved. Here, we quantified aquatic invertebrate community structure and secondary production in southeast Alaska (USA) streams that represent a meltwater...

Fire is an integral natural disturbance in the moist temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, but future changes remain uncertain. Fire regimes in this climatically and biophysically diverse region are complex, but typically climate limited. One challenge for interpreting potential changes is conveying projection uncertainty. Using projections of Energy Release Component (ERC) derived from 12 global climate models (GCM) that vary in performance relative to the region's contemporary climate, we simulated thousands of plausible fire seasons with the stochastic spatial...

The application of lidar data to assist with forest inventory is common around the world. However, the determination of tree species is still somewhat elusive. Lidar data collected using UAS (uncrewed aircraft systems) platforms offer high density point cloud data for areas from a few to several hundred hectares. General point cloud metrics computed using these data captured differences in the crown structure that proved useful for species classification. For our study, we manually adjusted plot and tree locations to align field trees and UAS lidar point data and computed common descriptive...

Wetland management practices often alter habitat characteristics to improve the function of the wetland (e.g., removing emergent vegetation for aesthetics or dredging for fish stocking), potentially at the cost of reducing habitat quality for wetland-dependent species such as freshwater turtles. We identified wetland and surrounding landscape characteristics related to painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) and snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) relative abundance and snapping turtle movement among wetlands. We surveyed turtles at 29 wetland sites (0.04–1.71 ha) in a mixed-use watershed in...