Treesearch

The Levels-of-Growing-Stock study for ponderosa pine was a collective effort among western Research Stations within the US Forest Service. The experiment was established to test sustainable productivity across a wide range of densities by periodically thinning the plots. Beyond the original purposes for wood production, contemporary applications of these long-term studies have been to determine stand density effects on (i) both overstory and understory responses to stand development of even-aged ponderosa pine, (ii) biomass accumulation and carbon sequestration, (iii) plant diversity and...

Thousand cankers disease (TCD), is an invasive insect-disease complex caused by the walnut twig beetle, Pityophthorus juglandis, and fungal pathogen, Geosmithia morbida. Semiochemical interruption is a viable option for protecting walnut trees from P. juglandisattack. The goal of this study was to test beetle responses to potential repellent compounds. The results of five, flight-intercept assays are reported. Assays 1–3 tested four compounds at variable release rates: (S)-(−)-verbenone, (R)-(+)-verbenone, racemic chalcogran, and racemic trans-conophthorin. Trapping results indicated that...

Wildlife crossing structures have been shown to be one of the most effective means of reducing animal-vehicle collisions on highways, while facilitating essential animal movement across the landscape. Yet the widespread implementation of such structures, especially wildlife overpasses, has been hindered by their perceived and actual expense. For that reason, a facilitated workshop was convened on October 8–9, 2014, in Bozeman, Montana, at Montana State University, with prominent wildlife crossing experts from Canada and the United States to determine whether there are design parameters and...

The status of wild bees has received increased interest following recent estimates of large-scale declines in their abundances across the United States. However, basic information is limited regarding the factors affecting wild bee communities in temperate coniferous forest ecosystems. To assess the early responses of bees to bark beetle disturbance, we sampled the bee community of a Douglas-fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii(Mirb.), forest in western Idaho, United States during a Douglas-fir beetle, Dendroctonus pseudotsugaeHopkins (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), outbreak beginning in summer 2016....

Ecologists now recognize that the classical theory of population and community ecology is severely limited by its inability to represent the efffects of individual adaptive behavior, but we are still looking for ways to accommodate adaptive behavior in models and theory. This issue is important because the behavior of individuals can strongly affect the responses of animal populations to habitat restoration and other alterations of the environment, as well as to direct interactions with people. This meeting review describes a series of talks that addressed how mechanistic individual-based...

• Wood formation was present in early angiosperms, but has been highly modified through evolution to generate the anatomical diversity seen in extant angiosperm lineages. In this project, we modeled changes in gene coexpression relationships associated with the evolution of wood formation in a phylogenetic survey of 13 angiosperm tree species. • Gravitropic stimulation was used as an experimental treatment to alter wood formation and also perturb gene expression. Gene transcript abundances were determined using RNA sequencing of developing wood tissues from upright trees, and from the top...

Predicting the behavior of overland flow with analytical solutions to the kinematic wave equation is appealing due to its relative ease of implementation. Such simple solutions, however, have largely been constrained to applications on simple planar hillslopes. This study presents analytical solutions to the kinematic wave equation for hillslopes with modest topographic curvature that causes divergence or convergence of runoff flowpaths. The solution averages flow depths along changing hillslope contours whose lengths vary according hillslope width function, and results in a one‐dimensional...

Recent bioacoustic advances have facilitated large‐scale population monitoring for acoustically active species. Animal sounds, however, can of information that is underutilized in typical approaches to passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) that treat sounds simply as detections. We developed 3 methods of extracting additional ecological detail from acoustic data that are applicable to a broad range of acoustically active species. We conducted landscape‐scale passive acoustic surveys of a declining owl species and an invasive congeneric competitor in California. We then used sex‐specific...

1. Surveys for environmental DNA (eDNA) can provide an efficient and effective means of detecting aquatic organisms in various types of aquatic systems. 2. In the summer of 2017, the efficacy of a new, integrated eDNA backpack sampler to detect two native amphibians (Rana sierraeand R. cascadae) at risk was tested in complex mountain meadows in California. Samples were collected at 65 locations in 15 meadows where the target species were known to be present or were historically present. 3. Collection and preservation of individual samples took less than 10 min on average. Environmental DNA...

Each year, wildlife biologists deploy thousands of echolocation detectors to monitor bat activity and find out what species are present at a site. But pulling these results together in a single place could help us learn more about broader scale patterns of bat activity and their seasonal movements. A new tool, the Bat Acoustic Monitoring Visualization Tool (https://visualize.batamp.databasin.org/), helps to do just that. Since its inception in 2013, users have contributed over 200,000 nights of detector data to BatAMP resulting in an unprecedented collection of results that allows users to...