Treesearch

The Pacific Northwest (PNW) Research Station developed a problem analysis to direct the research on natural resource-based communities in the Pacific Northwest over the next 5 years. The problem analysis identifies four problem areas: (1) social values related to rural peoples, communities, and development, and their ties to resource management are largely unknown; (2) traditional concepts of rurality do not reflect the complex, varied socioeconomic structures of today’s rural places and peoples; (3) the theories, models, and practices of collaborative stewardship as they relate to...

On November 3,1998, Oregon voters soundly rejected a ballot initiative intended to promote sustainable forestry practices and protect forest ecosystems by restricting clearcut logging and herbicide and pesticide use. We found that initiative support was greater in more urban counties composed of more educated residents earning higher incomes and with higher proportions of registered Democrats. Opposition was strongest in counties composed of higher proportions of forest industry employees and native-born Oregonians. Measure 64 voting data provide an opportunity to examine the potential...

Monitoring soil compaction is time consuming. A desire for speed and lower costs, however, must be balanced with the appropriate precision and accuracy required of the monitoring task. We compared three core samplers and a cone penetrometer for measuring soil compaction after clearcut harvest on a stone-free and a stony soil. Precision (i.e., consistency) of each tool at depths of 0-10, 10-20, and 20-30 cm was determined from two adjacent samples at 21 or more sampling points in each harvested location. Because one bulk density (Db) sampler provided a continuous sample of each decimeter...

Integrating management actions to consistently achieve broad ecological and socioeconomic goals is a challenge largely unmet. The presumed or real conflict between these goals establishes a forum for debate. Broad measures are needed to describe tradeoffs, trends in conditions under varying management scenarios, and a transparent science underpinning. The Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project in the northwestern United States provides a useful example where scientists, managers, and the public have explored these issues in depth. From a science perspective we conclude that a...

Tourism has been the fastest growing component of Alaska’s economy for the past decade and is an important export sector for the regional economy. Opportunities to participate in outdoor recreation are also an important component of the quality of life for residents of Alaska. Successful planning for the Chugach National Forest therefore will require an understanding of (1) recreation and tourism as an economic sector, (2) factors contributing to growth in recreational activity in south-central Alaska, and (3) prospective future levels and types of demand for recreation. By using a...

Assessments of vegetation response to climate change have generally been made only by equilibrium vegetation models that predict vegetation composition under steady-state conditions. These models do not simulate either ecosystem biogeochemical processes or changes in ecosystem structure that may, in turn, act as feedbacks in determining the dynamics of vegetation change. MC1 is a new dynamic global vegetation model created to assess potential impacts of global climate change on ecosystem structure and function at a wide range of spatial scales from landscape to global. This new tool allows...

Effects of roads in forested ecosystems span direct physical and ecological ones (such as geomorphic and hydrologic effects), indirect and landscape level ones (such as effects on aquatic habitat, terrestrial vertebrates, and biodiversity conservation), and socioeconomic ones (such as passive-use value, economic effects on development and range management). Road effects take place in the contexts of environmental settings, their history, and the state of engineering practices, and must be evaluated in those contexts for best management approaches.

In recent years, growing awareness among tourism researchers of the relations between tourism and natural resource management has resulted in a substantial body of academic literature examining tourism issues under a relatively new set of tourism concepts. Seemingly new forms of tourism, such as nature-based tourism, ecotourism, and sustainable tourism, now are advocated as an environmentally safe basis for economic development in many rural locations worldwide. The USDA Forest Service has become interested in these new forms of tourism because of decreasing timber harvests and increasing...

We compared 45 photographs taken before 1925 to photographs taken as late as 1999 and documented landscape changes above 5,000 feet elevation in the Wallowa, Elkhorn, and Greenhorn Mountains of northeastern Oregon. We noted the following major changes from these comparisons: (1) the expansion of subalpine fir into mountain grasslands, (2) the invasion of moist and wet meadows by several tree species, (3) a loss of whitebark pine from subalpine habitats, (4) continued soil erosion stemming from livestock grazing long since discontinued, and (5) a high rate of natural gravitational mass...

Natural resource managers are being confronted with increasing conflict and litigation with those who find their management plans unacceptable. Compatible and sustainable management decisions necessitate that natural resource agencies generate plans that are not only biologically possible and economically feasible but also socially acceptable. Currently, however, we lack a framework to integrate socially acceptable judgments with the biological and economic factors that help define successful forest management plans. This research examines the ability of a knowledge base approach to assess...