Treesearch

Understanding recent and potential future trends in recreation demand can help inform natural resource managers and decision makers as they plan for investments that support sustainable recreation and plan how to manage forests and rangelands that provide a diversity of goods and ecosystem services. We focus on participation and engagement for 17 recreation activities common in forests and rangelands across the United States. For each activity, within each U.S. region and for all ownerships collectively, we project the number of adult participants and the number of days of recreation in...

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 California. 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...

Outdoor programs for veterans (OPVs) support the physical and mental health benefits of nature-based experiences, seeking to mitigate the constraints to participation that veterans commonly face. But OPVs themselves often face organizational constraints to service delivery. The COMPACT Act of 2020 required the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to establish an interagency task force to coordinate with public land agencies to enhance outdoor opportunities for veterans. A federal information request in 2022 asked veteran organizations and the public to identify constraints they...

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 California. 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...

Wood and coal cofiring holds great potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from grate-fired combustion systems, as well as being widely technically feasible. This research was among the first to evaluate CO and NOx levels within grate-fired cofiring at small utility scales. We evaluated two wood fuel types—high-quality aspen chips and lower-quality pellet mill residues. Each wood fuel was evaluated at two cofiring rates. Over 6 days of testing, CO contents ranged from 40 to 620 ppm, and NOx contents ranged from 82 to 145 ppm. We found statistically significant differences in CO...

Community forests (CFs) are a forest ownership and governance approach that enable community members and other key stakeholders to cooperatively manage local forests to produce a range of benefits that align with local community priorities. While well-studied internationally, there is a lack of research that systematically documents how CFs can contribute to rural prosperity in the U.S. amidst ongoing socioeconomic and environmental change. We adapt a framework developed to characterize the contributions of forests to rural prosperity in the international context to investigate the...

In 2020, six wildfires burned more than 1 million acres over the Labor Day weekend in Oregon. Jeremy Fried, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, saw an opportunity to study how these wind-driven megafires affected forest structure and carbon storage, and how forest structure before the fires may have influenced fire severity.With research fellows Sebastian Busby and Angela Klock, Fried developed a model that estimated wind speed when wildfire entered forest plots previously inventoried through the national Forest Inventory and Analysis...

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 coastal Alaska. 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...

A wide variety of wildlife species occur in red spruce (Picea rubens) and spruce-fir forests, and these forest types represent optimal habitat for several vertebrate and invertebrate species of conservation concern. In this chapter, we synthesized our understanding of wildlife diversity in red spruce and spruce-fir ecosystems in the central and southern Appalachians, and identified species that are reliant on occurrence of these ecosystems. We also reviewed six major insect pests of red spruce in our focal regions. Red spruce and spruce-fir ecosystems are important habitats for at least 1...

Land development in the southwestern USA has caused intensive landscape change and created conflicts with Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia), which rely on underground burrows and occupy sites often attractive for development. Passive relocation is a mitigation method for owls on development sites that involves excluding owls from their burrows followed by collapsing and filling those burrows to prevent reuse. We worked with developers in Phoenix, Arizona, to locate owls, and we evaluated how passive relocation and other factors influenced their survival, dispersal, and reproduction. From...