Treesearch

Building containment lines and removing fuels can bring wildland firefighters close to advancing flames. In these high-risk situations, firefighters depend on safety zones - large, open areas with little flammable material where they can retreat if conditions turn dangerous.

While sampling freshwater fish across Montana and northern Idaho about 15 years ago, Michael Young, a research fish biologist at the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, became interested in the taxonomy for sculpins. “Biologists across the West, including us, were resorting to labeling our field-collected specimens as ‘Cottus sp.,’ which is shorthand for ‘we don’t know what we’re looking at,’” Young recalled. “We got fed up not knowing the identity of these fish and decided to do something about it.”

One fundamental question is driving Mexican spotted owl management research: What is happening to owl habitat? Scientists with the USDA Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) along with partners have developed a methodology for tracking long-term trends in Mexican spotted owl habitat in the southwestern United States. The project analyzed nearly 3,000 known owl nest and roost sites, data from the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis program, Landsat imagery going back to 1986, and regional climate and local topographic information to create predictive owl habitat...

Species across the planet are shifting their ranges to track suitable climate conditions in response to climate change. Given that protected areas have higher quality habitat and often harbor higher levels of biodiversity compared to unprotected lands, it is often assumed that protected areas can serve as steppingstones for species undergoing climate-induced range shifts. However, there are several factors that may impede successful range shifts among protected areas, including the distance that must be traveled, unfavorable human land uses and climate conditions along potential movement...

Rangelands are areas where the natural vegetation is comprised principally of grasses, forbs, grasslike plants, and shrubs that are suitable for browsing or grazing, but the presence of herbivory is not a prerequisite for rangeland classification. In this chapter, we evaluate the nature of rangeland resources across the conterminous United States and provide projections of future rangeland resources. One of the main changes since the 2010 Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment has been the dramatic increase in computational power and remotely sensed data describing the biophysical...

Wildfire affects many types of communities and is a particular concern for communities in the wildland urban interface (WUI), such as those of Park County, Colorado. The core intent of this project was to provide evidence to support the Platte Canyon Fire Protection District (PCFPD) and Fire Adapted Bailey in their wildfire mitigation and education programming. This report describes wildfire risk data collected in fall 2020 and pairs it with social data collected in the fall and winter of 2020-2021, in order to better understand residents’ knowledge, experiences, and perceptions about...

The identification of Armillaria and Desarmillaria species associated with Armillaria root disease is important to determine management strategies, due to their variation in pathogenicity and virulence.

Fusarioid fungi that cause damping-off and root diseases can result in significant losses to conifer crops produced in forest nurseries across the USA. These nurseries are vital to reforestation and forest restoration efforts. Understanding the diversity of Fusarioid fungi associated with damping-off and root diseases of conifer seedlings can provide an approach for targeted management techniques to limit seedling losses and pathogen spread to novel landscapes.

Although plant-soil feedbacks (interactions between plants and soils, often mediated by soil microbes, abbreviated as PSFs) are widely known to influence patterns of plant diversity at local and landscape scales, these interactions are rarely examined in the context of important environmental factors. Resolving the roles of environmental factors is important because the environmental context may alter PSF patterns by modifying the strength or even direction of PSFs for certain species. One important environmental factor that is increasing in scale and frequency with climate change is fire,...