Treesearch

Climate models predict future increases in the frequency, magnitude, and duration of natural hazard events, including heat waves, droughts, and wildfires. People may be aware of these natural hazards but unfamiliar with new patterns expected under climate change. Ideally, people would take action to protect themselves from natural hazard events—even those with which they have limited prior experience. Doing so would likely reduce the public costs of later assisting individuals impacted by events when they occur. Although a large body of research has examined how people perceive and protect...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station hosted a 2-day regional biomass workshop in May 2022, with the objective of reviewing recent developments, trends, and opportunities in biomass utilization. Day 1 focused on recent research, and Day 2 focused on biomass success stories from practitioners and business owners. About 120 attendees participated in this virtual event.Effective biomass utilization—from forest residues, wood products residues, and thinned or sustainably harvested stands—is one tool that managers have to help mitigate wildfire...

Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) is an increasingly common method for monitoring birds and other sound-producing organisms at scale, but methods that digest these data streams into ecological insight remain underdeveloped. Specifically, using PAM and classification algorithms powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover the phenology of vocal animals is an emerging use of these data but currently lacks standardized, repeatable methods with verified connections to biological phenomena. Here, we articulate specific hypotheses regarding the relationship between avian vocal activity and...

Headwater streams play critical roles in hydrologic and biogeochemical processes and functions, yet their spatial distribution and land cover context remain poorly understood at continental scales, and no dedicated geospatial dataset exists. Building from a high-resolution conterminous United States (CONUS) hydrography network dataset, we quantified the spatial extent, density, and upstream catchment characteristics of headwater stream segments across the CONUS. We identified approximately 8.4 million kilometers of headwater streams, finding that 77% of the total stream network consists of...

Aim: The biogeography and distribution of irruptive forest insect herbivores are driven by population level responses to host availability, temperature, and precipitation. Because the irruptive dynamics of tree‐killing insects such as spruce beetle are regulated by climate, it is imperative to quantify biogeographic drivers and limiters to develop informed predictions and forecasts of future outbreaks. Here, we: (1) identify subcontinental drivers of spruce beetle outbreak distributions, (2) compare drivers and limiters of outbreaks across regions, and (3) develop geospatial hindcasts and...

Ambient acoustic conditions shape how animals perceive and interact with their environments, yet their role in structuring space use remains underexplored. Noise can mask biologically informative sounds which can impact foraging success, physiological fitness, and displace animals from viable habitat. Here, we test how landscape variables and soundscape characteristics across a mixed-use forest landscape affect spatial distribution of a nocturnal predator with specialized hearing. We used passive acoustic recordings to assess the effects of noise levels within biologically relevant...

An increase in the occurrence of large, high severity wildfires in the western Pacific Northwest (PNW), USA, has created an urgent need for science to better inform forest management and policy decisions to maintain source water quality in the region. The western PNW faces similar challenges to other regions with shifting wildfire regimes and large population centers reliant on surface water from forested catchments. However, the uniquely wet and highly seasonal climate of the western PNW suggests that findings from other, more frequently burned regions may not be directly applicable. To...

Passive acoustic monitoring is increasingly used for broad-scale, noninvasive tracking of biodiversity across space and time, but processing the resulting audio data at scale remains a major challenge. To address this, we have iteratively developed PNW-Cnet, a convolutional neural network trained to detect wildlife vocalizations in unprocessed field recordings collected throughout a large, forested region of the western United States. Initially built to identify six owl species, PNW-Cnet has evolved through successive retrainings and dataset expansion. We trained PNW-Cnet v5 on 824,120...

The biodiversity crisis necessitates spatially extensive methods to monitor multiple taxonomic groups for evidence of change in response to evolving environmental conditions. Programs that combine passive acoustic monitoring and machine learning are increasingly used to meet this need. These methods require large, annotated datasets, which are time-consuming and expensive to produce, creating potential barriers to adoption in data- and funding-poor regions. Recently released pre-trained avian acoustic classification models provide opportunities to reduce the need for manual labelling and...

Land managers use hazard (susceptibility) and risk rating systems to guide the application of forest management treatments that aim to reduce future damages to forests. Rating systems are typically designed for individual damage agents, but tree mortality often results from multiple agents without a clear proximate cause. In interior Douglas‐fir (DF, Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca ) forests in the Northern Rocky Mountains, USA, multiple damage agents are commonly associated with DF tree mortality, such as insects, disease, weather, and fire. We investigated how recent DF tree mortality...