Treesearch

The fourth workshop of the Western Hemisphere Bird Banding Network (WHBBN) was held at the 25th International Ornithological Congress in Compos do Jordão, Brazil on August 22, 2010. 38 individuals representing 11 countries within the Americas attended the congress, as well as individuals from Australia and the UK. A total of 6 people were able to attend the workshop with the support of US Fish and Wildlife Service and private donors. During the workshop, the status and achievements of the Network to date were evaluated, and a series of presentations on issues relevant to the Network were...

Fire plays an important role in shaping many Sierran coniferous forests, but longer fire return intervals and reductions in area burned have altered forest conditions. Productive, mesic riparian forests can accumulate high stem densities and fuel loads, making them susceptible to high-severity fire. Fuels treatments applied to upland forests, however, are often excluded from riparian areas due to concerns about degrading streamside and aquatic habitat and water quality. Objectives of this study were to compare stand structure, fuel loads, and potential fire behavior between adjacent...

Forests contain the world's largest terrestrial carbonstocks, but in seasonally dry environments stock stability can be compromised if burned by wildfire, emitting carbon back to the atmosphere. Treatments to reduce wildfireseverity can reduce emissions, but with an immediate cost of reducing carbonstocks. In this study we examine the tradeoffs in carbonstock reduction and wildfireemissions in 19 fuels-treated and -untreatedforests burned in twelve wildfires. The fuels treatment, a commonly used thinning ‘from below’ and removal of activity fuels, removed an average of 50.3 Mg C ha-1 or...

More than four decades of research provide unequivocal evidence that sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury pollution have altered, and will continue to alter, our nation’s lands and waters. The emission and deposition of air pollutants harm native plants and animals, degrade water quality, affect forest productivity, and are damaging to human health. Many air quality policies limit emissions at the source but these control measures do not always consider ecosystem impacts. Air pollution thresholds at which ecological effects are observed, such as critical loads, are effective tools for assessing...

Developing efficient monitoring strategies for species of conservation concern is critical to ensuring their persistence. We have developed a method using camera traps to estimate density and survival in mesocarnivores and tested it on a population of fishers Martes pennanti in an area of approximately 300 km2 of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Fishers in this region are isolated from other populations by a gap of approximately 400 km, and the status of individual populations in the southern Sierra Nevada is poorly understood, making management decisions difficult. We...

This policy brief explores the use and expands the conversation on the ability of geospatial technologies to represent Indigenous cultural knowledge. Indigenous peoples' use of geospatial technologies has already proven to be a critical step for protecting tribal self-determination. However, the ontological frameworks and techniques of Western geospatial technologies differ from those of Indigenous cultures, which inevitably lead to mistranslation and misrepresentation when applied to cultural knowledge. The authors advocate the creation of new technologies that are more conducive to...