Treesearch

One of the great and largely unmet challenges associated with ecosystem management is treating people as a rightful part of ecosystems. In many ecosystem models, despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary, there is still a tendency to treat people as autonomous individual agents outside the ecosystem, at best a source of values to be incorporated into decisions, at worst agents of catastrophic disturbances of an otherwise smoothly running system. Many scholars have made suggestions for bringing social concepts and variables into ecosystem models and assessments (Driver et al. 1996; Force...

The most prevalent approach to understanding recreation experiences in resource management has been a motivational research program that views satisfaction as an appropriate indicator of experience quality. This research explores a different approach to studying the quality of recreation experiences. Rather than viewing recreation experiences as a linear sequence of events beginning with expectations and ending with outcomes that are then cognitively compared to determine experience quality, this alternative approach views recreation as an emergent experience motivated by the not very...

Tourism, especially rural tourism, epitomizes the problematic elements of sustainability. On the one hand, as a service industry trading on the uniqueness of a place and region, tourism is seen as more environmentally benign than industrial production, manufacturing, extractive industries, and even agriculture. When traditional resource dependent industries decline (whether due to depletion of resources, emergence of more competitive alternatives, or promulgation of environmental regulations), local communities, environmental organizations, and politicians often turn to tourism as a way to...

Soils were mapped on the 22,533 ha Desert Experimental Range, Utah, to determine the kind, extent, and distribution of major soils and soil groups, the type of vegetation associated with each soil group, and the correlation between herbage production and soil groups. The results indicated that Desert Experimental Range soils are primarily Haplocalcids, Torriothents, and Torrifluvents. They occur within the Temperate Desert and Temperate Steppe climatic types. Annual herbage production averages 250 kg per ha per year. High production years yield twice the average, often with many annual...

Many forest roads are being closed as a step in watershed restoration. Ripping roads with subsoilers or rock rippers is a common practice to increase the infiltration capacity of roads prior to closure. When considering the effectiveness of ripping for reducing runoff and erosion and the potential reduction in slope stability by saturating road fills, it is important to know how ripping changes the infiltration capacity of forest roads. Hydrographs from simulated rainfall on 1-m x 1-m plots were analyzed to find the saturated hydraulic conductivity, an indicator of infiltration capacity. I...

Many ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests of the western, interior United States have undergone substantial structural and compositional changes since settlement of the West by Euro-Americans. Historically, these forests consisted of widely spaced, fire-tolerant trees underlain by dense grass swards. Over the last 100 years they have developed into dense stands consisting of more fire-sensitive and disease-susceptible species. These changes, sometimes referred to as a decline in 'forest health’, have been attributed primarily to two factors: active suppression of low-intensity fires...

Variation in the distribution of species richness as a result of introduced errors of omission and commission in the Gap Analysis database for Oregon was evaluated using Monte Carlo simulations. Random errors, assumed to be independent of a species' distribution, and boundary errors, assumed to be dependent on the species' distribution, were simulated using ten rodent species. Error rates of omission and commission equal to 5 and 20 percent were used in the simulations. Indications are that predictions of species richness within a Gap Analysis database can be very sensitive to both types...

Vegetation type, soils, climate, and conversion ratios influence estimates of terrestrial C. Our objectives were to (i) determine carbon to organic matter (C/OM) ratios for brown cubical rotten wood, litter, surface humus, soil wood, and mineral soils; (ii) evaluate the validity of using 0.58 and 0.50 ratios for estimating C in mineral and organic soil components, respectively; and (iii) determine if C/OM relationships were applicable across broad geographic areas. The study sites were located from the southern to northern Rocky Mountains. They differed in vegetation, soil parent material,...

The northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis), is a northern latitude, forest dwelling raptor. In the Western United States, goshawks live in most forests, including those dominated by western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.), lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. ex. Loud.), ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex Laws.), and western larch (Larix occidentalis Nutt). It preys on a variety of small birds and mammals that require an array of forest conditions. Fire, being the primary disturbance mechanism throughout the Western United States, provided landscapes that contained and...

Soil organic components are important factors in the health and productivity of Inland Northwest forests. Timber harvesting and extensive site preparation (piling, windrowing, or scalping) reduces the amount of surface organic material (woody residues and forest floor layers) over large areas. Some wildfires and severe prescribed burns can have similar consequences. Such organic matter reductions can have important implications for soil chemical, biological and physical properties. A number of studies have linked substantial reduction in mycorrhizae development and tree growth to high...