Treesearch

The Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) program seeks to assess the condition and trend of the forests of the United States (Riiters et al. 1992; NAPAP 1993). FHM is linked with the national sampling grid established by the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) of the Environmental Protection Agency. Epiphytic lichen communities were included in FHM because they help to answer several key assessment questions. These questions concern the contamination of natural resources, biodiversity, forest health, and sustainability of timber production.

This paper examines public support for new user fees established at the Desolation Wilderness in California as part of the Fee Demonstration Program. Traditional approaches to fee policy evaluations have typically focused on economic or revenue issues and equity impacts of various pricing strategies. Support for fees has been shown to vary by users in terms of attitudes toward fees, nature of usage or behaviors, and demographics. Fee support may also vary by the type of recreation or resource area, especially in the case of dispersed recreation areas such as wilderness or other sites,...

This paper examines wilderness users' response to recently established overnight camping fees at the Desolation Wilderness in California. Fee program evaluations have typically focused on economic or revenue issues, distributional or equity impacts of various pricing strategies, and questions of price fairness. In the case of wilderness recreation fees, it is also important to recognize the complex public purpose of wilderness and the long history of not having access fees in wilderness. To evaluate these various factors, this paper examines the impact of past wilderness experience and...

An intellectual map is a good starting point for any effort to integrate research on the human dimensions of ecosystem management. We must remember going into such exercises, however, that every map maker imposes a certain point of view, sense of order, or set of conventions in the effort to represent the world. Just as there are competing ways to divide the landscape into ecological or social units, there are many ways to divide intellectual territory. One interpretation of the relevant intellectual domains to be inregrated and applicd to ecosystem management is the list of disciplines...

We evaluated the effect of summer biogeography of migrant wood warblers (Parulidae) on their stopover abundance. To characterize abundance patterns, we used mist-net capture data from spring and fall migration in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico, spring migration on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, and fall migration on the Gulf Coast of Alabama. To describe the summer biogeography of 47 species of wood warblers, we used indices of their summer range size, their summer density, and distance between their summer ranges and our netting sites. Multiple linear regressions indicated that...

The restoration of natural fire to wilderness ecosystems poses a significant challenge to the federal land management agencies. The U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service have conducted progressive prescribed natural fire (PNF) programs for more than two decades. The U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management has only recently approved the use of PNF in a few wilderness areas, whereas the U.S. Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service has relied primarily on the use of management-ignited fires to...

With the increasing demand of people recreating in protected areas, managers around the world are asking questions about how to manage recreation use, whether to limit use, and if so, when to limit use. How do managers decide when recreation use is causing unacceptable resource damage and how to restrict use to limit damage? And how do they know whether restrictions that have been implemented are effective at meeting management goals? In the mid-1980s the Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) process was formally defined to address these types of questions. Since then, wilderness managers in...

We used radiotelemetry to determine habitat use by flammulated owls (Otus flammeolus) during the breeding season on 452 ha of montane conifer forest in central Colorado in 1982-1983. Mean size and SD of home ranges was 11.1 +/- 1.9 ha (range = 8.5-12.5 ha, n = 4) in 1982 and 18.3 +/- 5.1 ha (range = 14.0-24.0 ha, n = 3) in 1983. Habitat use by nesting males was affected by distribution of old forests of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) mixed with Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), by topography, and by juxtaposition of home ranges of conspecifics. In spring, both new and returning owls...

Traditionally, state agencies in the United States have invested millions of dollars to collect information on fish populations. Management of fisheries resources often necessitates the sharing of this information across political boundaries. Federal agencies need to share information on fish populations across political boundaries to complete the congressional mandates of the Resource Planning Act (U.S. Forest Service) and Resource Conservation Act (Natural Resources Conservation Service). Further, these data are needed for other analyses such as proposed listings under the Endangered...

Understanding the relationship between animal community dynamics and landscape structure has become a priority for biodiversity conservation. In particular, predicting the effects of habitat destruction that confine species to networks of small patches is an important prerequisite to conservation plan development. Theoretical models that predict the occurrence of species in fragmented landscapes, and relationships between stability and diversity do exist. However, reliable empirical investigations of the dynamics of biodiversity have been prevented by differences in species detection...