Articles

Using past wildfire data to analyze where firelines were successful, burned over, or unengaged provides data-driven insights for safer, smarter, and more effective wildfire response strategies and decisions.

Widespread stream incision across the Western U.S. has led to the loss of floodplain connectivity, lowered water tables, and the degradation of riparian ecosystems. These changes reduce biodiversity, diminish water storage capacity, harm grazing lands and wildlife habitat, increase vulnerability to drought, and eliminate wetland corridors that once functioned as natural firebreaks.

The Rocky Mountain Research Station has co-produced a vulnerability assessment for aquatic and riparian ecosystems in the southwestern United States.

Koa, a tree commonly used in Hawaiian forest restoration, does not suppress exotic grasses enough to allow secondary forest succession to a more diverse forest type.

A large wildfire depleted soil carbon in a chaparral ecosystem and microorganisms continued to decompose carbon pools after the fire, preventing soil carbon for recovering for at least 4 years.

Riparian and groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs) in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest provide critical ecosystem services but are threatened by multiple interacting stressors.

The Climate Smart Restoration Tool estimates seed transfer distance and vegetative transitions for current and mid-century climate by using current and future climate data, coupled with vegetative inventories.

Simulations that incorporate ecological resilience and invasion resistance into benefit-cost analysis of fuel treatments can help land managers to plan and implement cost effective fuel treatments in sagebrush ecosystems.

In Hawai'i, new efforts aim to increase the availability of native, site-specific, genetically appropriate seed to restore areas burned by wildfires.

Just in time for National Grasslands Week, the Microsoft "AI for Good" program announced that StockSmart, a livestock grazing management tool, will receive financial and technical support to enhance the tool’s capability. The award includes Microsoft Azure cloud computing credits and the opportunity to work with scientists from the AI for Good Lab, which will enable the winning team of researchers from Washington State University, the University of Arizona, and the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station to further develop and enhance StockSmart for ranchers, range specialists, and others who use it.

The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers awarded USDA Forest Service Emeritus Research Engineer Bill Elliot a 2025 Superior Paper Award for his publication, “Runoff and Erosion Following a Prescribed Fire on a Sagebrush-Steppe Rangeland in Idaho, USA.”Rangelands provide water filtration, biodiversity, and are vital for wildlife and livestock.This research can help manag...

An updated chapter within the 2024 Remote Sensing Handbook describes ongoing global challenges facing rangeland management, how practitioners are addressing them, and includes advances in remote sensing capabilities.

A new study reveals how the data from everyday smartphones can help us better understand and balance the needs of wildlife and recreationists.

Using data from 2013 to 2015, researchers looked at precipitation, streamflow, water turbidity, and suspended-sediment concentration on the Colorado Front Range.

Read a new Science You Can Use about how two recent research studies uncovered some of the key factors that increase the performance of tree seedlings planted after wildfire.

Contrary to previous assumptions, woody encroachment patterns can largely be predicted by a null model based only on steady tree population growth, suggesting that modern increases in woodland density may be a result of long-term population expansion and recovery rather than anthropogenic land-use changes.

An interdisciplinary team has begun a multiyear treatment and monitoring study to support pinyon-juniper core woodland vulnerable to intensifying wildfire.

The temperature of soil at the ground surface has big impacts on tree seedlings and future forest cover.

Microbial communities found in depressional vs. upslope soils impact nitrous oxide emissions in agricultural fields due to differences in nitrogen cycling.

Whitebark pine trees grew faster and had better resin duct characteristics in forests where competing tree species had been thinned.