Treesearch

Thousands of acres of densely stocked ponderosa pine forests surround Flagstaff, AZ. These stands are at high risk of fire, insect, and disease outbreak. Stand density management activity can be expensive, but product recovery from the thinned material could help defray removal costs. This project evaluated the yield and economic return of lumber recovered from small-diameter, suppressed ponderosa pine. A sample of 150 trees ranging from 6 to 16 inches in diameter at breast height was selected. Half of the sample was sawn into dimension lumber and the other half into appearance grade...

Managing whole ecosystem is a concept gaining considerable acceptance among forest managers throughout the Northwest, but it does not have a clear or simple definition. Terminology and definitions can be confusing. Forests are complex places, formed by complex processes, and the moment we try to simplify, we are likely to damage the healthy functioning of those processes. Clearly, understanding why we are making certain management decisions can help improve ecosystem management approaches. One way—among many—to measure progress in ecosystem management is through monitoring certain small...

What are the best alternatives for easing conflict among aesthetics, economic values, and sustained wood production of responsible timber harvesting? How can forest managers craft options across a landscape for a mix of values and forest conditions? In part, with an understanding of the interactions of sustained timber production, wildlife habitat, and aesthetics. This issue of Science Findings examines a joint research project being conducted by the PNW Research Station and the Washington Department of Natural Resources on highly productive, predominate Douglas-fir land in the 90,000-acre...

Mandates to harvest, beetle infestations, log export restrictions, pulp mill closures, high transportation costs, ecological versus economic effects--the litany of challenges in the Alaska timber markets is sufficient to stymie land and timber managers. For decades, they have had to confront and make decisions about these conflicting issues without sufficient data about land management alternatives. To improve their decisionmaking capacity, the Ecologically Sustainable Production of Forest Resources Team at the Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Portland has completed 13 wood product recovery...

Recreational and tribal use of mushrooms has been historically important, and during the last two decades, commercial demand for mushrooms has burgeoned. A large nontimber forest product market in the Pacific Northwest is for various species of wild edible mushrooms. Many of these species grow symbiotically with forest trees by forming nutrient exchange structures called "mycorrhizae" on their root tips. Managers are beginning to better understand the biology and ecology of some commercial mushroom species. Estimates of site productivity, silvicultural implications for mushroom yields, and...

In the next few decades, hundreds of private dams will be relicensed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Many of them are on or influence Forest Service lands. Relicensing requires rigorous technical assessments of the effects of dams on critical resources, including channels, aquatic habitat, water quality, and recreation. Dams differ widely in their influence on these resources, and predicting their consequences is critical. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest Research Station examined the effects of the Pelton-Round Butte Dam complex on the gemorphology of the Deschutes River...

Traditional scientific assessments have limitations in providing full understanding of the potential impacts forest management has on communities. Much of the knowledge communities have of themselves is inaccessible to quantitative methods but can be provided through participatory processes, or what is termed "civic science." Self-assessment by communities, social scientists at PNW Research Station theorized, would contribute more richly to the understandings of communities, factors that influence the capacity of a community to adapt to external change, and the relationship communities...

Biodiversity has at last become a familiar term outside of scientific circles. Ways of measuring it and mapping it are advancing and becoming more complex, but ways of deciding how to conserve it remain mixed at best, and the resources available to manage dimishing biodiversity are themselves scarce. One significant problem is that policy decisions are frequently at the local scale, where as biodiversity mapping is more often at the regional or national scale. Building on gap analysis techniques, one hierarchical, objective approach to conserving biodiversity is based on prioritizing sets...

Twentieth century fire patterns were analyzed for two large, disparate wilderness areas in the Rocky Mountains. Spatial and temporal patterns of fires were represented as GIS-based digital fire atlases compiled from archival Forest Service data. We find that spatial and temporal fire patterns are related to landscape features and changes in land use. The rate and extent of burning are interpreted in the context of changing fire management strategies in each wilderness area. This research provides contextual information to guide fire management in these (and similar) areas in the future and...

Bioregional assessments to deal with critical, even crisis, natural resource issues have emerged as important meeting grounds of science, management, and policy across the United States. They are placing heavy demands on science, scientists, and science organizations to compile, synthesize, and produce data, for policy decisions. There is no blueprint for their conduct, but lessons from past experience can help stakeholders—Forest Service scientists, Research Station, land managers, policymakers, and the public—to proceed productively in future assessment.