Treesearch

Background: Six synchronous, wind-driven, high severity megafires burned over 300,000 hectares of mesic temperate forest in the western Cascades of NW Oregon and SW Washington states in early September 2020. While remote sensing data has been utilized to estimate fire severity across the fires, assessments of fire impacts informed by field observations are missing. We compiled field measurement data, pre- and post-fire, from a statistically representative sample of existing forest inventory analysis (FIA) plots, to estimate stand-level fire effects indices that describe (1) tree survival...

Wildfires are increasingly frequent in the Western US and impose a number of costs including from the instantaneous release of carbon when vegetation burns. Carbon released into the atmosphere aggravates climate change while carbon stored in vegetation helps to mitigate climate change. The need for climate change mitigation is becoming more and more urgent as achieving the Paris climate agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C seems ever more challenging. A clear understanding of the role of different carbon sources is required for understanding the degree of progress toward...

Animals dependent on old, closed-canopy forests may be particularly sensitive to forest disturbances, such as timber harvest and high-severity fires, that may take centuries to recover from. Tracking habitat trends can provide broader context to conservation decisions, including the role of forest disturbance type. We assessed habitat dynamics across the range of the red tree vole (Arborimus longicaudus), a canopy-obligate rodent with low-mobility that typically occurs in old forests. We developed and applied a red tree vole habitat model to imagery data each year across 37 years (1986-2022...

Armillaria altimontana is a fungus (Basidiomycota, Agaricomycetes, Agaricales, and Physalacriaceae) that is generally considered as a weak/opportunistic pathogen or saprophyte on many tree hosts. It widely occurs across the northwestern USA to southern British Columbia, Canada, but relatively little is known about its ecological role in the diverse forest ecosystems where it occurs. This review summarizes the biology and ecology of A. altimontana, including its identification, life cycle, distribution, host associations, and bioclimatic models under climate change.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station has launched a research initiative to improve and organize policy-relevant understanding of forest carbon accounting and fill knowledge gaps about forest carbon dynamics. There are several dimensions to forest carbon accounting, including tracking wood products flow from the forest to various destinations. More information is needed to improve the accounting of timber harvested within the Pacific coast region (PCR; British Columbia, California, Oregon, and Washington) but processed elsewhere. We used...

Fish invasions threaten native freshwater ecosystems worldwide, yet methods to map biodiversity in data-deficient regions are scarce. Rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and brown trout (Salmo trutta fario) have been introduced to the Himalayan ecoregion where they are sympatric with vulnerable native snow trout Schizothorax plagiostomusand Schizothorax richardsonii. We aim to evaluate potential habitat overlap among snow trout and non-native trout in the Indus and Ganges River basins, Himalayan ecoregion. We transferred maximum entropy (MaxEnt) models developed with spatially continuous...

The Brazilian Amazon has been a focus of land development with large swaths of forests converted to agriculture. Forest degradation by selective logging and fires has accompanied the agricultural frontier and has resulted in significant impacts on Amazonian ecosystems. Changes in forest structure resulting from forest disturbances have large impacts on the surface energy balance, including on land surface temperature (LST) and evapotranspiration (ET). This study's objective is to assess the effects of forest disturbances on water fluxes and forest structure in a transitional forest site in...

Weather conditions at the time of wildfire front arrival strongly influence fire behavior and effects, yet few methods exist for estimating weather conditions more spatio-temporally resolved than coarse-grain (e.g., 4 km) daily averages. When a fire front advances rapidly and weather conditions are heterogeneous over space and time, greater spatio-temporal precision is required to accurately link fire weather to observed fire effects. To identify the influence of fire weather on fire effects observed across a sample of existing forest inventory plots during a wind-driven megafire event in...

Species detection using eDNA is revolutionizing global capacity to monitor biodiversity. However, the lack of regional, vouchered, genomic sequence information especially sequence information that includes intraspecific variation—creates a bottleneck for management agencies wanting to harness the complete power of eDNA to monitor taxa and implement eDNA analyses. eDNA studies depend upon regional databases of mitogenomic sequence information to evaluate the effectiveness of such data to detect and identify taxa. We created the Oregon Biodiversity Genome Project to create a database of...

Rangelands may offer valuable habitat for invertebrate wildlife, helping conserve ecologically and economically significant organisms, like native bees. In some systems, livestock may affect bees by consuming or trampling blooming plants that bees rely on for food. One potential way to reduce potential negative effects of livestock on bees is to delay grazing on floristically rich parts of the landscape until after peak bloom (i.e., phenologically targeted grazing). To test the outcome of this method, we collected bees using pan traps and counted blooming stems from May to September in...