Treesearch

A workshop on monitoring terrestrial (land) bird populations in New Zealand was held on 11 December 2005, following the Australasian Ornithological Conference, St Mary's Parish Centre, Blenheim, New Zealand. The primary objective of the workshop was to consider options for the design and implementation of a terrestrial breeding bird population survey for New Zealand. It was not an objective to make recommendations for particular options, but some recommendations did emerge: The main objective of monitoring terrestrial breeding birds should be to provide reliable, robust, and spatially...

Concepts about the natural world influence approaches to forest management. In the popular press, climate change inevitably refers to global warming, greenhouse gas impacts, novel anthropogenic (human-induced) threats, and international politics. There is, however, a larger context that informs our understanding of changes that are occurring - that is, Earth’s natural climate system and its variability.

Earth’s natural climate system is characterized by continually changing climates, with climate regimes that oscillate quasi-cyclically at multiple and nested scales from annual to multi-millennial, and commonly change abruptly. Under naturally changing climates, plant species track changes at all scales in individualistic manner, with plant communities changing as dominances fluctuate and species ranges shift. The capacity of plant species to adapt to changing natural climates depended historically on their ability to move over the landscape following favorable conditions. The human-dominat...

Climate variability and sustained change presage far-reaching transformations across America’s West, an expanse dominated by immense mountain ranges and interspersed with important urban centers. These mountains provide the region’s life blood—water that courses through its streams and runs out its faucets, power that fuels its industries and lights its cities, and natural resources that feed its economy and provide many of its jobs.The West is a land where life is written in water—from vast ranchlands and farmlands, to large densely populated urban areas—and the communities of the West...

In this chapter, we explore linkages between two fields that have been little acquainted yet have much to say to one another: restoration ecology and climatology. The limited discourse between these fields is surprising. In the last two decades there have been significant theoretical breakthroughs and a proliferation of research on historical climate and climate-related sciences that have led to an overhaul of our understanding of Earth’s climate system (Smith and Uppenbrink 2001). These new insights are relevant to restoration and ecology—so much so that fuller understanding could trigger...

Deadwood tree stems scattered above treeline on tephra-covered slopes of Whitewing Mtn (3051 m) and San Joaquin Ridge (3122 m) show evidence of being killed in an eruption from adjacent Glass Creek Vent, Inyo Craters. Using tree-ring methods, we dated deadwood to AD 815-1350 and infer from death dates that the eruption occurred in late summer AD 1350. Based on wood anatomy, we identified deadwood species as Pinus albicaulis, P. monticola, P. lambertiana, P. contorta, P. jeffreyi, and Tsuga mertensiana. Only P. albicaulis grows at these elevations currently; P. lambertiana is not locally...

Even after 140 years without a fire, mixed-conifer forest such as Teakettle's Experimental Forest has a distinct patch pattern and complex structure. Researcher Malcolm North and colleagues examined the structure and function of these ecosystems and their response to widely used restoration treatments. Collectively the studies found fire was essential to restoring many ecosystem processes and that thinning could be best used as a tool to influence burn intensity and extent.

The Sudden Oak Death Second Science Symposium provided a forum for current research on sudden oak death, caused by the exotic, quarantine pathogen, Phytophthora ramorum. Ninety papers and forty-six posters on the following sudden oak death/P. ramorum topics are included: biology, genetics, nursery and wildland management, monitoring, ecology, and diagnostics. Several papers on P. kernoviae and other forest Phytophthora species are also presented.

Saprotro phic ambrosia and bark beetles (Coleoptera: Scolytidae) tunnel into the bark overlying cankers caused by Phytophthora ramorum in coast live oaks, Quercus agrifolia. These insects are characteristically reported to colonize freshly dead or moribund trees (Furniss and Carolin, 1977). However, the initial attacks by these beetles on P. ramorum-infected coast live oaks are limited to the bleeding cankers. In a disease progression study (McPherson and others, 2005), we found that beetles were present in about 50 percent of all bleeding trees in each of four years and every bleeding...