Treesearch

Following a wildfire, regeneration to forest can take decades to centuries and is no longer assured in many western U.S. environments given escalating wildfire severity and warming trends. After large fire years, managers prioritize where to allocate scarce planting resources, often with limited information on the factors that drive successful forest establishment. Where occurring, long-term effects of postfire salvage operations can increase uncertainty of establishment. Here, we collected field data on postfire regeneration patterns within 13- to 28-yr-old burned patches in eastern...

Modeling landscape use (i.e., estimating the probability or relative probability of use, occurrence, or selection in a given area and time) by ungulates is an increasingly common and important practice in research and management. Models of occupancy, distribution, movement, habitat use, and resource selection are formal approaches by which landscape use has been characterized and results published for a myriad of ungulate species. Understanding landscape use has benefited from a growing volume of data on animal locations and model covariates, and the ease of modeling with automated...

The National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program data underlies estimates of the volume of recreation use of the National Forest System. The data also enable estimation of both the local economic contributions and nonmarket benefits of that visitation. Applications include evaluating the effects of natural disasters, site characteristics, and climate change, as well as expenditure and benefit transfers. This article describes the history and science background of the NVUM program, outlines the methods used in estimating market and nonmarket economic outcomes, and lists some examples of...

There is limited research on recreationists’ responses to changes in resource conditions after wildfire. Existing studies often rely on presenting visitors with hypothetical wildfire scenarios or simulated changes in conditions. We completed a quick assessment of recreation visitation and visitor experience in the months immediately following an actual high-severity wildfire within a popular river canyon in Oregon, USA. We also explored the influence of wildfire on the recreation plans of campers. We found that recreation use dropped sharply in the immediate aftermath of the wildfire, but...

Understanding habitat associations is vital for conservation of at-risk marsh-endemic wildlife species, particularly those under threat from sea level rise. We modeled environmental and habitat associations of the marsh-endemic, Federally endangered salt marsh harvest mouse (Reithrodontomys raviventris, RERA) and co-occurrence with eight associated small mammal species from annual trap data, 1998–2014, in six estuarine marshes in North San Francisco Bay, California. Covariates included microhabitat metrics of elevation and vegetation species and cover; and landscape metrics of latitude–long...

Passive acoustic monitoring is an emerging approach to wildlife monitoring that leverages recent improvements in automated recording units and other technologies. A central challenge of this approach is the task of locating and identifying target species vocalizations in large volumes of audio data. To address this issue, we developed an efficient data processing pipeline using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to automate the detection of owl vocalizations in spectrograms generated from unprocessed field recordings. While the project was initially focused on spotted and barred...

Passive acoustic monitoring using autonomous recording units (ARUs) is a fast-growing area of wildlife research especially for rare, cryptic species that vocalize. Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) populations have been monitored since the mid-1980s using mark–recapture methods. To evaluate an alternative survey method, we used ARUs to detect calls of Northern Spotted Owls and Barred Owls (S. varia), a congener that has expanded its range into the Pacific Northwest and threatens Northern Spotted Owl persistence. We set ARUs at 30 500-ha hexagons (150 ARU stations) with...

Summertime low clouds are common in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), but spatiotemporal patterns have not been characterized. We show the first maps of low cloudiness for the western PNW and North Pacific Ocean using a 22‐year satellite‐derived record of monthly mean low cloudiness frequency for May through September and supplemented by airport cloud base height observations. Domain‐wide cloudiness peaks in midsummer and is strongest over the Pacific. Empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis identified four distinct PNW spatiotemporal modes: oceanic, terrestrial highlands, coastal, and...

Context As the frequency of large, severe fires increases, detecting the drivers of spatial fire severity patterns is key to predicting controls provided by weather, fuels, topography, and management. Objectives Identify the biophysical and management drivers of severity patterns and their spatial variability across the 2013 Rim Fire, Sierra Nevada, California, USA. Methods Random forest models were developed separately for reburned and fire-excluded ([80 year) areas within Yosemite National Park (NP) and Stanislaus National Forest (NF). Models included biophysical, past disturbance, and...

As the American Fisheries Society (AFS) approaches its sesquicentennial, it is a time to take a moment to celebrate the increasing diversity within the Society and the pivotal role of pioneering women in shaping fisheries. Gender disparities still persist in science, including in fisheries where only a fraction of academic tenure-track, research, and federal scientist positions are held by women, though attainment of PhDs in biological sciences is equal between women and men. In addition, an extensive review of published peer-reviewed articles in both the International Aquaculture Curated...