Treesearch

1. The colonization of suitable yet unoccupied habitat due to natural dispersal or human introduction can benefit recovery of threatened species. Predicting habitat suitability and conflict potential of colonization areas can facilitate conservation planning.2. Planning for reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to the US state of Colorado is underway. Assessing which occupancy sites minimize the likelihood of human-wolf conflict during dispersal events and seasonal movements is critical to the success of this initiative.3. We used a spatial absorbing Markov chain (SAMC) framework,...

Bigseed biscuitroot is a widespread western species, ranging from southern British Columbia to southeastern Manitoba and south to California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and South Dakota (Fig. 8 – note this figure includes historic and contemporary herbarium records) (Currah et al. 1983; Lesica 2012; Welsh et al. 2016). In Washington and Oregon, it is much more common east of the Cascade Range (Baker 1956; Hitchcock et al. 1961). In California, it occurs as far south as Kern and San Luis Obispo Counties (Munz and Keck 1973).

Pale agoseris is widely distributed throughout the western United States and Canada (Table 1). In the US, it occurs in all states west of Colorado and in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Michigan (Baird 2006). Distributions of the two varieties overlap but variety glauca occurs farther south and variety dasycephala occurs farther north. In the states and provinces where their distributions overlap, variety glauca generally occupies lower elevation sites and variety dasycephala higher elevation sites (Hitchcock and Cronquist 2018). The varieties become difficult to distinguish in the northern...

Bigflower agoseris occurs in locations west of central Utah. It occurs in southern British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Montana, and is most common in those states bordering the Pacific Ocean (Baird 2006). Variety grandiflora is most common east of the Cascade Mountains and southward on both the east and west side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to southern California (Fig. 1). Variety leptophylla is most common west of the Cascade Mountains from Vancouver Island through Puget Sound and the Willamette Valley to the Siskiyou-Klamath Mountains of southwest...

Our recent contribution to Global Change Biology found that, globally, two-thirds of protected area units and over half of protected land area are unlikely to serve as steppingstones for many species under a warming climate (Parks et al., 2023). In response, Gillingham and Thomas (2023) point to previous evidence that protected areas have acted as steppingstones based on three studies from Great Britain that examined range shifts.Original publication: Parks, Sean A.; Holsinger, Lisa M.; Abatzoglou, John T.; Littlefield, Caitlin E.; Zeller, Katherine A. 2023. Protected areas not likely to...

Millions of acres of public and private land in the United States are at risk of losing the native plant communities that are central to the integrity of ecosystems. As plant communities decline, the biodiversity they embody is also being rapidly lost, along with a wealth of ecosystem goods and services important to society. There is a long and growing list of threats to plant communities-invasive species, overgrazing, climate change, and altered fire regimes, to name a few, that have collectively accelerated the deterioration of natural landscapes across the country.

Healthy forests are critically important for mitigating the effects of climate change, reducing biodiversity loss, and protecting our water resources. Decades of chronic underfunding combined with the worsening impacts of climate change and wildfire have increased the need for reforestation across the Western United States. This article highlights the challenges impacting tree-seed availability and suggests opportunities for strengthening the tree-seed supply chain to meet reforestation goals in an era of climate change. This paper was presented at The Reforestation Pipeline in the Western...

Within the global water cycle, the groundwater pool represents a substantial volume of water, containing approximately 8,000-23,000•103 km3 (Abbott et al., 2019). Annual groundwater discharge to the ocean (0.1e6.5•103 km3/year) is two to three orders of magnitude smaller than oceanic evaporation (350e510•103 km3/year), which initiates the continental part of the water cycle through atmospheric condensation and landward precipitation (88e120•103 km3/year). The other segments of the water cycle are part of our daily life: the clouds in the sky, the polar ice seen from satellites and the...

The importance of interactions among stream hydrology, morphology, and biology is well recognized in studies of stream ecosystems. However, when quantifying the impacts of altered flow on aquatic habitat, results are often based either on combined changes in topography and flow, or with altered flow over static topography. Here, we study the potential beneficial effects of restoring unregulated flows on salmonid habitat and separate the relative influences of changes in flow vs. topography. We hypothesize that flow restoration will increase topographic complexity and that the coevolution...

Riverine water flows both above the streambed and within the porous sediment surrounding rivers (Nagaoka and Ohgaki, 1990; Mendoza and Zhou, 1992), ubiquitously entering and exiting the permeable streambed and banks as the flow moves downstream (Boano et al., 2014). This interstitial movement of riverine water is called hyporheic flow and forms a saturated volume of sediment surrounding alluvial rivers that is termed the hyporheic zone (Fig. 3.1A) (Gooseff, 2010). The extent of the hyporheic zone can be defined through biological, geochemical, or hydraulic means and is a transitional area...