Treesearch

Increasingly, wilderness managers must choose between the objective of wildness (“untrammeled” wilderness) and the objectives of naturalness and solitude. This dilemma has surfaced with awareness of the pervasiveness of human influence in wilderness and that regulation is often the only way to maintain outstanding opportunities for solitude. Should we trammel wilderness to compensate for unnatural effects of human activity or, to avoid trammeling wilderness, should we allow conditions to become increasingly unnatural? Should we restrict access and behavior to preserve opportunities for...

The threat of life and property losses related to wildfires is a significant issue for federal, state, and local fire and planning agencies who consider the mix of residential areas and wildlands. The wildland fire threat is part of the more general consideration of human development encroaching wildlands. The March, 2000 edition of the Journal of Forestry reflects this with urban encroachment and wildland fragmentation the principal subject with residential fire one of the specific issues (Cohen 2000). Presently, the wildland fire threat to homes influences fire management and protection...

Using the taxonomy of personal benefits attributed to wilderness and developed for the 1985 national wilderness conference, this paper summarizes the research since published on the benefits of nonfacilitated uses of wilderness. It describes recent developments in theory and methods regarding leisure experiences and discusses the implications of these developments for understanding wilderness benefits. The paper proposes that results of research on the benefits of wilderness can facilitate an outcomefocused approach to wilderness management.

Decades of fire absence from ponderosa pine/Douglas-fir forests has resulted in overstocked, unhealthy, and severe fireprone stands requiring management attention. Prescribed fire can be used in three general situations during restoration management. First is when fuel loadings are excessive from either natural accumulation or harvest slash. Second is when dense understory conifers are thinned and burned. Third is when tree cutting is impractical or against policy and, therefore, applied fire may be the only practical option. Maintenance burning should be planned to coincide with future...

What is the nature of humankind’s relationship with the natural world? To what extent can social science shed light on this relationship? What are the most pressing research questions? What limitations present themselves? Drawing from the experiences of a 16th century cartographer, Fra Mauro, the author addresses the prospects for successfully mapping the meaning of wilderness in contemporary life.

Research is one of the intended purposes of wilderness. The Wilderness Act states that “wilderness may contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.” This session specifically focuses on the pros and cons of conducting research in wilderness.

An unlogged forest landscape in the Colorado Front Range provides insight into historical characteristics of ponderosa pine/Douglas-fir landscapes where the past fire regime was mixed severity with mean fire intervals of 50 years or more. Natural fire and tree recruitment patterns resulted in considerable spatial and temporal heterogeneity, whereas nearby forest landscapes impacted by logging, grazing, and fire suppression are much more homoge neous. The historical landscape characteristics serve as a guide for restoration of current landscape conditions to improve ecological sustainability...

This note presents a simple model formulation that focuses on the spatial relationships over time between timber harvesting and sediment levels in water runoff courses throughout the watershed being managed. A hypothetical example is developed to demonstrate the formulation and show how sediment objectives can be spatially defined anywhere in the watershed. Spatial sensitivity in the example is shown, indicating that, at least in some cases, tracking sediment levels below a watershed may be inadequate for achieving sediment objectives within the watershed itself.

This document provides information on three sampling methods used to inventory and monitor the vegetation resources in riparian areas. The vegetation cross-section method evaluates the health of vegetation across the valley floor. The greenline method provides a measurement of the streamside vegetation. The woody species regeneration method measures the density and age class structure of any shrub or tree species that may be present in the sampling area. Together these three sampling procedures can provide an evaluation of the health of all the vegetation in a given riparian area.

Since passage of the Wilderness Act, economists have derived the total economic valuation framework for estimating wildland benefits. Over the same time period, policies adopted by public land management agencies have been slow to internalize wilderness economics into management decisions. The lack of spatial resolution and modeler bias associated with the FORPLAN model, combined with asymmetrical budget shortfalls, procedural errors and the overestimation of stumpage prices have contributed to a commodity bias in public land allocation decisions. This bias has spurred some economists to...