Treesearch

Knowledge of the recruitment of dominant forest species is a key aspect for forest conservation and the ecosystem services they provide. In this paper, we address how the simultaneous action of climate change and the intensity of land use in the past influence the recruitment of a forest species that depends on the provision of nurse plants to recruit. We compared the number of saplings (up to 15 years old) and juveniles (16 to 50 years old) of Quercus ilex in 17, 5.3 ha plots in the Iberian System (eastern Spain). We used a gradient of past deforestation intensity crossed with two levels...

Anthropogenic disturbances in tropical forests cause shortand long-term alterations in forest structure, species composition, and successional processes. However, improved understanding of the impacts of disturbance on forest functioning is needed to support forest management and conservation. In this study, we investigated the phenological responses of two sites in the Brazilian Amazon to forest degradation (selective logging and forest fires). We used MODIS-derived time-series to assess pre- and post-disturbance trajectories of two vegetation indices: Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and...

Mortality of trees is an important ecological process altering forest structure and function as well as influencing forest management decisions. Recent observations suggest that the overall rate of tree mortality is increasing at local to global scales. While more data on mortality is needed to document these changes, key concepts are also needed to guide the collection, interpretation, and use of this information. Mortality can be considered as a general process that includes all forms of tree-related death ranging from parts of trees to large-scale disturbances. Viewing mortality as a...

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) developed an invasive species risk assessment procedure, presented in Marcot et al. (2019), consisting of an existing rapid assessment process for plants and animals (Ecological Risk Screening Summary; ERSS) and a new probability-based Bayesian network model (Freshwater Fish Injurious Species Risk Assessment Model; FISRAM), that may be used to help prioritize invasive freshwater fish species for Federal injurious wildlife listing evaluation by USFWS under the Lacey Act. Hill et al. (2020) provided a rebuttal letter of Marcot et al. (2019) but did...

Mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) are widely hunted throughout western North America and are experiencing population declines across much of their range. Consequently, understanding the direct and indirect effects of hunting is important for management of mule deer populations. Managers can influence deer mortality rates through changes in hunting season length or authorized tag numbers. Little is known, however, about how hunting can affect site fidelity patterns and subsequent habitat use and movement patterns of mule deer. Understanding these patterns is especially important for adult...

Disturbance refugia – locations that experience less severe or frequent disturbances than the surrounding landscape – provide a framework to highlight not only where and why these biological legacies persist as adjacent areas change but also the value of those legacies in sustaining biodiversity. Recent studies of disturbance refugia in forest ecosystems have focused primarily on fire, with a growing recognition of important applications to land management. Given the wide range of disturbance processes in forests, developing a broader understanding of disturbance refugia is important for...

The Micronesia Challenge (MC) is an agreement initiated in 2006 by the region’s political jurisdictions to conserve both marine and terrestrial natural resources. To assess the success of the terrestrial goals of the challenge, the Micronesia Conservation Trust (MCT) coordinated the compilation of a list of terrestrial measures and utilized them to summarize data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program. The MCT and FIA programs added and measured additional forest plots within conservation and special management...

Forest wildfires consume and redistribute carbon within forest carbon pools. Because the incidence of wildfires is unpredictable, quantifying wildfire effects is challenging due to the lack of prefire data or controls from experiments over a large landscape. We explored a quasi-experimental method, propensity score matching, to estimate wildfire effects on aboveground forest woody carbon mass in Washington and Oregon, United States. Observational data, including national forest inventory plot measurements and satellite imagery metrics, were utilized to obtain a control set of unburned...

Complex early-seral forests support biological legacies and unique understory vegetation (grasses, forbs, shrubs, juvenile trees) important to wildlife and ecosystem functioning. Intensive management in early-seral forest and other stages could reduce understory plant diversity and homogenize community compositions. Furthermore, the relative effects of management regime may vary at different stages of forest development. To what extent do taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity vary by seral stage and/or ownership (a proxy for management regime) after accounting for climatic...

Systems-based land management frameworks such as ecosystem services can improve cultural resource management and outdoor recreation in natural areas. We analyzed data from a participatory mapping survey of forest values from an ecological restoration area in the East Cascades, which provide conceptual and methodological tools that can be utilized in land management more widely. We also consulted archaeological, paleo-ecological, and traditional land use data to link heritage values with cultural landscapes. Heritage benefits mapped by respondents were associated with connections to...