Treesearch

U.S. National Forest Service units in California are increasingly vulnerable to wildfires that could result in people being displaced during and after these events. The purpose of our study was to identify characteristics of national forest users potentially displaced due to recreation site closures from a wildfire event. This information is useful for managers to inform public outreach strategies. Our study focused on California’s Los Padres National Forest, which is a popular recreation area and has five resident communities. First, we produced a burn probability map using the FlamMap...

As cities heat up and expand in area and population, urban forests offer a nature-based solution to enhance liveability and reduce rising temperatures in cities. However, urban forests are vulnerable to climate change and face costly establishment and maintenance challenges. Here we explore four key ecological and socioeconomic barriers to achieving resilient urban forests: species selection, tree supply, tree life cycle (establishment and maintenance, including irrigation) and community engagement. We discuss how integrating traditional urban forestry practices with emerging technology...

There are growing efforts to incorporate agroforestry into ecosystem service incentive programs. Indigenous and other place-based multi-strata agroforestry systems are important conservation and agricultural strategies, yet their ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration benefits, have received little research attention. To fill this gap, we draw on interviews with agroforestry practitioners and ecosystem service modeling in Hawaiʻi to: (1) create future scenarios of where fallow unmanaged agricultural and non-native dominated conservation lands could be transitioned to multi-strat...

Biocultural nature-based solutions provide many social, cultural, and ecological benefits. Yet, there has been little research on related land-sea societal benefits, hindering our ability to finance and scale these solutions. To help fill this gap, we evaluate the land-sea benefits of scaling biocultural restoration initiatives in Hawaiʻi, including multi-strata agroforestry and high-elevation silvopasture combined with native forest protection. We innovated and integrated a blue food production model into a land-sea modeling framework to illustrate the societal benefits of biocultural...

Urban forests (UF) have been documented as a strategy for mitigating urban heat in population centers of the Global North that are affected by extreme temperatures. However, few have studied this ecosystem service in such climate-vulnerable, humid, tropical cities with less than 50,000 inhabitants, limited resources, and weak adaptive capacity to heatwaves. Accordingly, we studied the tropical city of Puerto Carreño, Colombia, to explore the links between tree heat regulation, human thermal comfort, and the subsequent effects on human well-being during the extremely hot season of 2021....

Recovered and recovering carnivore populations in Europe and North America can pose risks to some human livelihoods like livestock ranching. These risks can motivate wildlife managers to lethally remove carnivores—decisions that are often controversial and poorly understood. We used a 13-year dataset on gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the northwestern United States (Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon) to analyze how social, demographic, and environmental variables influence lethal removal of wolves at the county and state levels. We found that state-level differences are a major driver of...

Although insurance is an important risk management tool in many resource-dependent sectors, its connections to natural resource use are not well understood. We estimate the impact of US federal crop insurance pricing policy on the private use of common pool groundwater in the High Plains region of the United States. Field level panel data on insurance purchases and groundwater extraction allow us to exploit spatial discontinuities in insurance prices at county borders while instrumenting for endogenous prices. A theoretical model describes the mechanisms connecting insurance and resource...

Indigenous agroecological practices have been identified as sustainable place-based practices supporting community resilience and revitalizing biocultural landscapes in Hawaiʻi. In areas where traditional knowledge and practice have been fractured because of colonial practices, new tools, such as spatial modeling, can aid in understanding the distribution of pre-colonial land use. Currently, spatial models of traditional agriculture do not capture the type of systems that supported populations in the Hilo and Puna districts on Hawai‘i Island before European arrival in 1778. We utilized a...

A key issue in landscape management, whether public or private, is the mitigation of disturbance events that impact vegetation, ecosystem health, and thus ecosystem services (ESs). Although many studies have found significant tree mortality due to insect infestations, there is still insufficient understanding of how these infestations alter ESs and their associated economic values. Addressing this research gap can assist forest managers and decision-makers in refining and implementing adaptive management practices and policies, while enhancing the resilience of forests and their ESs. We...

We conducted a qualitative literature review and provided a theoretical discussion of how private, common, and public land property rights (LPRs) uniquely influence the effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Service (PES). We considered three aspects of PES’s effectiveness: additionality (PES programs typically employ tests to assess whether the payment will result in additional ecosystem services), socioeconomic impacts, and transaction costs. The existing literature has not addressed differences between LPR types with respect to ensuring additionality. Particularly striking is the lack...