Treesearch

What is the meaning associated with participation in an outdoor adventure for a person with a disability? A number of studies have investigated the topic of adventure program outcomes for people with and without disabilities. The author located two studies about kayaking with individuals with disabilities: 1) Siegel Taylor and Evans McGruder (1995) found “subjects valued the novelty, challenge, safety, sociability and natural environment aspects of sea kayaking” (p.39) and 2) Nichols and Fines (1995) reported “…the group mean score [on The Tennessee Self-Concept Scale) increased to reflect...

By now the statistics are all too familiar: rates of obesity and incidents of related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and depression have reached epidemic proportions among US adults and children. These conditions have been linked along with other factors such as nutrition to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles brought on by changes in technology in our homes and workplaces, urban sprawl, and the perceived and actual safety of our communities (Jackson & Kochtitzky, 2002). The consequences of physical inactivity have been estimated to be responsible for more than 200,000 deaths...

This paper focuses on identifying applications of recreation survey results in the context of water-based recreation planning. Recreation researchers have sometimes been criticized for conducting research that is weak in applied value (Cordell 1999). The paper also focuses on the important, but sometimes forgotten role that private entities play (e.g., Pacific Gas and Electric Company or other utilities) in planning for and providing recreation opportunities. Organizations that manage water bodies in California are faced with providing increased public access and facilities to meet growing...

To understand the roles of forest management practices in meeting the goals of forest sustainability and CO2 sequestration, we evaluated the effects of burning and thinning treatments on soil respiration and soil environments in an old-growth, mixed-conifer forest in California’s southern Sierra Nevada. Six experimental treatments with two levels of burning and three levels of thinning were implemented across three dominant patch types: closed canopy (CC), Ceanothus shrub (CECO), and open canopy (OC). We measured soil respiration rate (SRR), soil temperature (T10), moisture (Ms), and...

The title of this conference, ""Views From the Ridge"" suggests a particular scalar view of issues. From the ridge, one obtains a somewhat broad but restricted view of the landscape. Certainly, ""Views From Space"" would provide a larger spatial overview in which landscape pattern becomes a dominant theme. For an aquatic or riparian theme, ""Views From the Valley"" would suggest looking upward to the hillslope and ridges, in contrast to looking down from the ridge. Issues concerning appropriate scale have been prevalent in most of the recent landscape assessments, including the Northwest...

Long the bane of foresters, but of interest to ecologists, bearclover inhabits thousands of acres of forest land in northern and central California. Little quantification of its recovery after disturbance is available because knowledge on the morphology of flowers, seeds, and rhizomes is fragmented, and physiological processes, especially plant moisture and photosynthetic relationships, are unknown. Consequently, most of the dozens of treatments that have been tried to manipulate bearclover have failed. Bearclover’s rhizomes efficiently gather soil moisture and together with high rates of...

Patterns of pollen dispersal are central to both the ecology and evolution of plant populations. However, the mechanisms controlling either the dispersal process itself or our estimation of that process may be influenced by site-specific factors such as local forest structure and nonuniform adult genetic structure. Here, we present an extension of the AMOVA model applied to the recently developed TWOGENER analysis of pollen pool structure. This model, dubbed the Stepwise AMOVA (StAMOVA), focuses on determining to what extent ecological, demographic, and/or environmental factors influence...

The ethnic minority population of the US continues to increase due to rising minority birth rates coupled with the influx of ethnic immigrants to America's cities, suburbs and towns (Parrillo 1994). Based on present immigration trends, by the year 2050, 22 percent of the US population will be Hispanic and 10 percent will be Asian (US Department of Commerce 1994). Urban ethnic minority groups thus constitute an important and growing user segment of urban and community parks and forests. These parks and forests not only provide diverse opportunities for recreation, leisure, and cultural...

In 2000 and 2002, the U.S. experienced two of the worst fire seasons in 50 years. In 2000 there were 122,827 recorded fires that burned 8.4 million acres and destroyed 861 structures and in 2002 there were 88,458 fires that burned roughly 7 million acres, destroyed more than 800 structures, and took the lives of 23 firefighters (National Interagency Fire Center, 2002). This pattern is likely to increase because past land management has left abundant fuels, especially in the wildland-urban interface (Bogue, 1985; Cortner, Gardner & Taylor, 1990; Daniel, Meitner & Weidemann, 1997; Gardner &...