Treesearch

The National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program provides the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and the U.S. Congress with statistically sound estimates of recreation use in the National Forest System and the economic contribution of those recreation visits to rural communities. After 25 years and five rounds of NVUM sampling, the program has assembled long-term monitoring datasets to characterize forest visitors and understand spatial and temporal patterns of use. However, because the visitor-intercept sampling methodology for NVUM surveys is cost-intensive, program...

Fire is a significant disturbance agent, impacting forest structure and composition. In fire-adapted forests, fire can foster biodiversity by resetting successional processes and increasing habitat heterogeneity. However, fire suppression practices have altered historical fire regimes and left fire-adapted ecosystems largely unburned and the use of unburned forests by post-fire habitat specialists is understudied. Picoides arcticus (Black-backed Woodpecker) is a post-fire specialist that thrives in recently burned coniferous forests by exploiting heterogeneous patches of live and dead...

The northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) continues to decline across its range, threatened by habitat disturbances and invasive barred owls (Strix varia). We conducted a range‐wide spotted owl occupancy assessment using 2.1 million h of passive acoustic recordings from 4081 survey stations within 1027 randomly selected 5‐km 2 hexagons across six physiographic regions. Applying multistate occupancy models, we estimated probabilities of landscape use (by at least one northern spotted owl) and pair occupancy (occupied by both a male and a female), while accounting for imperfect...

Federal and state forest managers consider the effects of forest management, including no action, on carbon storage because of concerns of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Most CO2 emissions in the United States result from burning fossil fuels. Forests represent a large store of carbon, but individual stands can absorb or emit substantial amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere over durations as short as a decade. Currently, wildland forests (those outside of urban zones) in the United States are a net sink of carbon,...

We identify at-risk amphibians tied to aquatic-riparian habitats in U.S. Pacific Northwest forests for fire-management considerations and synthesize amphibian ecology and fire- and forest-management effects to provide guidance for sustainability of these amphibians during prefire fuel management, active wildfire management, and postfire management activities. We focus on seven amphibian groups that have both state-scale sensitive-species status and modeled viability concerns in regional moist coniferous forests. Chief concerns from both fire and fire management activities for these animals...

Background: Prescribed fire is a critical tool for managers of dry fire-prone forests used to create more fire resilient forests, improve wildlife habitat and increase understory diversity. However, there are still knowledge gaps around how to apply fire to achieve and balance desired conditions, such as how the forest understory responds to frequency of burning. We leveraged a unique long-term prescribed burn experiment and evaluated the responses of different understory vegetation components to differing fire return intervals (5-, 10-, 20-year) including two common shrub species of...

Forest and wildfire management in the 21 century requires working across jurisdictional boundaries and with various land management entities. One important group includes Native American tribes, sovereign nations with unique legal and political standings who possess deeply rooted, intergenerational knowledge of ecological processes and landscape dynamics. This research seeks to learn from and engage with existing landscape-scale efforts where tribes are leading the way in cross-boundary ecosystem collaboration. In this paper, we synthesize recent field experiences and identify emergent...

This report provides detailed estimates and highlights key findings from U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data collected across its Alaska Susitna-Copper FIA unit in 2019 and 2020. The Susitna-Copper FIA unit encompasses much of the Susitna River and upper Copper River watersheds and is one of six FIA inventory units designed to measure the expansive boreal forests of Alaska. Estimates of forest area, volume, aboveground biomass, and ecosystem carbon are provided across land ownerships, forest types, and forest demographics throughout the...

Protected area (PA) managers balance the need to provide quality visitor experiences with other management objectives (e.g., conservation, economic use), particularly in multi-use agencies. Sustainability science has informed PA management, emphasizing consideration of economic, environmental, and social interactions. Sustainable management of outdoor recreation has received far less attention. Moreover, there has been a lack of agreement among PA managers about how sustainable outdoor recreation is defined, operationalized, managed, or monitored. Having a shared understanding of ‘sustainab...

Increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere are warming and changing climate globally. Policymakers and land managers want to know the effectiveness of different approaches to reduce the increase in GHG while mitigating effects of future climate change. Forests can store large amounts of carbon and can gain or lose carbon relatively rapidly, making them a focus of study. A variety of ecosystem models have been applied to estimate hard-to-measure forest stocks and processes and to project alternative management scenarios into the future.We examined the...