Treesearch

Extreme heat in the United States is a leading cause of weather-related deaths, disproportionately affecting low-income communities of color who tend to live in substandard housing with limited indoor cooling and fewer trees. Trees in cities have been documented to improve public health in many ways and provide climate regulating ecosystem services via shading, absorbing, and transpiring heat, measurably reducing heat-related illnesses and deaths. Advancing “urban forest equity” by planting trees in marginalized neighborhoods is acknowledged as a climate health equity strategy. But...

Colombia has had one of the largest numbers of internally displaced populations in the world and in 2016 entered a period of post-conflict. These socio-ecological and geopolitical processes and trends have increased the migration of people towards cities and accordingly are affecting the distribution and occurrence of tropical diseases in its urban and peri-urban areas. Studies have suggested that anthropogenic phenomena such as urbanization scale according to the size of human populations regardless of cultural context. But, other studies show that health epidemics such as malarial and...

The supply of ecosystem services and the benefits that peri-urban areas provide to society are increasingly being modeled and studied using various ecological, environmental, social, and economic approaches. Nevertheless, the different types and levels of demand, preferences, or values for ecosystem services that different human beneficiaries have, often require information and econometric methods to account for human awareness or knowledge of the spatial underpinnings behind these processes, services, and benefits. Specifically, spatial information regarding the location of an ecosystem,...

The objectives of this study were to evaluate spatial sampling and statistical aspects of landscape-level wildfire rate of spread (ROS) estimates derived from airborne thermal infrared imagery (ATIR). Wildfire progression maps and ROS estimates were derived from repetitive ATIR image sequences collected during the 2017 Thomas and Detwiler wildfire events in California. Three separate landscape sampling unit (LSU) sizes were used to extract remotely sensed environmental covariates known to influence fire behavior. Statistical relationships between fire spread rates and landscape covariates...

Purpose of Review I aim to contextualize wildfire-disease interactions with the goal of building a better understanding of where these may be of ecological importance and problems for sustainable forest management. Recent Findings While wildfire-disease interactions have been documented, they are not well represented in the ecological literature, probably because they require considerable effort or serendipity to rigorously quantify. Examples of disease-fire interactions are relatively limited and tend to be clearer in systems where fire and disease are management problems. The most...

Disease combined with drought poses an important threat to plant survival, often compromising success in the restoration of riparian forests. Thus, understanding how biotic and abiotic stressors may affect plant survival and growth performance can greatly increase the success of ecosystem management strategies. The purpose of this study was to understand how two plant species, often used together in restoration of riparian ecosystems but with different ecological preferences, would respond to infection by each of two Phytophthoraspecies in Mediterranean-climate regions, in the absence or...

Effective conservation and management of a species relies upon understanding its habitat throughout its full annual cycle. For hoary bats, Lasiurus cinereus, their ecology is largely known from summer with the exception that they move long distances during autumn and spring and maintain some level of activity year-round. Autumn is a critically important period for hoary bats as they complete long-distance migrations between summer and winter range and they mate, both of which are energetically expensive. We studied hoary bat roost selection during autumn in a migratory stopover area in...

Scientist-manager partnerships are investigating novel silvicultural approaches for improving postfire reforestation success and fostering long-term climate-change adaptation in California’s low-elevation, westside Sierra Nevada forests.

The successful reestablishment of native conifer tree stands is a key step in forest restoration. In recent years, high severity wildfires have burned tens of millions of acres of forests in the western United States. Many of these lands require artificial reforestation and subsequent management in order to be fully restored and resilient to future drought, wildfire, and widespread insect attacks. Even though some seed trees may remain in the burned landscapes, natural regeneration has not guaranteed a resilient forest that can withstand the next wildfire. Furthermore, following regeneratio...

The reestablishment of natural fire regimes can have numerous benefits for forest ecosystems, including the restoration of stand structure through a reduction in tree densities and increased representation of large diameter trees. However, fire effects may depend on how departed the ecosystem is from its historical fire frequency. Red fir (Abies magnifica) forests occupy a broad geographic area across which historical fire return intervals and stand structures vary. Using historical stand inventory data from the Vegetation Type Mapping (VTM) project, we evaluated red fir forests in the...