Treesearch

The condition of aquatic habitat and the health of aquatic species, particularly salmon, are a significant concern in the Pacific Northwest. Land management agencies use fish and riparian guidelines intended to maintain or improve aquatic habitat. Gauging whether or not those guidelines are effectively meeting their objectives requires careful monitoring of stream conditions. A defensible monitoring program needs to be based on procedures that allow the existing state and changes in stream channel condition to be objectively and precisely measured over time.

Changing patterns of land use are at the heart of many environmental concerns regarding U.S. forest lands. Of all the human impacts to forests, development is one of the most significant because of the severity and permanency of the change. Concern about the effects of development on America’s forests has risen sharply since the 1990s, when the conversion of forest land to developed uses reached a million acres per year nationwide. Between 1982 and 1997, there was as much private land deforested in the United States as all the forests in the state of Washington, 22 million acres.

Some federal forest managers working in late-successional reserves find themselves in a potential no-win situation. The Northwest Forest Plan requires that the reserves be protected from large-scale natural and human disturbances while simultaneously maintaining older forest habitat. This is a challenge for managers working in drier reserves, where forest types are prone to frequent wildfires. In such places, managers are faced with potentially conflicting objectives: thin trees to reduce the fire threat, or leave trees to provide spotted owl habitat. A case study of the Gotchen Reserve in...

The importance to society of environmental services, provided by forest ecosystems, has significantly increased during the last few decades. A growing global concern with the deterioration of forests, beginning perhaps most noticeably in the 1980s, has led to an increasing public awareness of the environmental, cultural, economic, and social values that forests provide. Around the world, ideas of sustainable, close-to-nature, and multi-functional forestry have progressively replaced the older perception of forests as only a source for timber. The international impetus to protect and...

Conservation measures for aquatic species throughout the Pacific Northwest rely heavily on maintaining forested riparian zones. A key rationale for this strategy is that the presence of standing and downed trees next to streams will provide a continuous source of wood, which is an important structural component of aquatic habitat. Yet little is known about the interactions between wood and debris flows, which are an important way that wood enters streams. Researchers from the PNW Research Station and Oregon State University created a physics-based simulation of debris flow dynamics in a...

Red alder (Alnus rubra, Bong.) is the most common hardwood in Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. It is used for a variety of products including firewood, pulp, and solid wood products such as furniture, cabinets and musical instruments. Pruning may be a viable management technique for increasing clear wood and, thus, value in managed stands but little information has been available. To determine the biological effects of pruning red alder, we selected 530 trees in 3-, 6- and 10-year-old plantations. Sample trees were from plots that had different previous silvicultural treatments,...

• Morphological and physiological attributes were assessed to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of ozone (O3) sensitivity in a highly sensitive species, cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata var. digitata). • Foliage at the same height in the canopy on paired O3-sensitive and -insensitive cutleaf coneflowers was assessed for level of foliar symptoms, stomatal density, stomatal responsiveness to dynamic changes in light and leaf-to-air vapor pressure deficit (VPD), steady-state responses to light and CO2, intrinsic transpirational efficiency, and plant water balance. • There were no...

A social and economic profile is a key element of a social assessment. A social and economic assessment or profile is used by line officers, planning staff social scientists, and others to inform both forest planning activities and project-level work. It is important to discover how planning and management decisions made by National Forest System staff will affect social and economic conditions in communities surrounding the forest. Since the writing of this technical guide, the 2005 Planning Rule 36 CFR 219.6 has been released. The new rule again requires that social assessments (evaluatio...

Chronic, excessive nitrogen deposition is potentially an important ecological threat to forests of the greater Sierra Nevada in California. We developed a model for ammonia bioindication, a major nitrogen pollutant in the region, using epiphytic macrolichens. We used non-metric multidimensional scaling to extract gradients in lichen community composition from surveys at 115 forested sites. A strong ammonia deposition gradient was detected, as evidenced by a high linear correlation with an index of ammonia indicator species conventionally known as "nitrophytes" (r = 0.93). This gradient,...

Firesheds are geographic units used by the Forest Service to delineate areas with similar fire regimes, fire history, and wildland fire risk issues. Fireshed assessment is a collaborative process where specialists design fuel treatments to mitigate wildfire risk. Fireshed assessments are an iterative process where fuel treatments are proposed for specific stands based on potential fire behavior, and the resulting matrix of treatments is evaluated in terms of reducing landscape scale fire spread. The Fireshed process uses an array of fire behavior models and GIS operations making it...