Treesearch

Fire managers often make decisions about wildfire incidents on a landscape scale. While several well developed models can predict fire behaviour at these scales, the paucity of data they draw upon can limit their range of validity. Other models explicitly represent the physical complexities of a fire environment, but at increased computational costs and increased sensitivity to boundary conditions. In this paper, we explore a middle ground between landscape level, data-driven fire behaviour predictions and physics-based, computationally expensive models. As a first step, we employ machine...

Spatial modelling and machine learning are powerful techniques that can be used to identify patterns within data and build complex relationships between response and predictor variables. While powerful, many of these techniques are computationally intensive and are not designed to fully leverage high performance computing resources, especially when used within a geospatial context. To fully leverage system resources, while facilitating various spatial, machine-learning, and statistical modelling workflows, we developed a Python-based processing library called raster_tools. The raster_tools...

Post-fire seeding has been widely implemented in the semiarid Great Basin because natural vegetation recovery may be compromised. Non-native species are often seeded to rapidly establish perennial cover and compete with invasive annuals. We asked whether seeding treatments with different amounts of native and non-native species followed different successional trajectories and whether they became more similar to reference communities over time. We considered restoration implications of seed mix choices and reference community options involving: (a) local unburned vegetation; and (b)...

Landscape connectivity, the extent to which a landscape facilitates the flow of ecological processes such as organism movement, has grown to become a central focus of applied ecology and conservation science. Several computational algorithms have been developed to understand and map connectivity, and many studies have validated their predictions using empirical data. Yet at present, there is no published comparative analysis which uses a comprehensive simulation framework to measure the accuracy and performance of the dominant methods in connectivity modelling. Given the widespread usage...

The taxonomy of sculpins (Cottus, Cottidae) remains one of the last major unresolved puzzles in the systematics of North American freshwater fishes. We used molecular approaches to identify candidate taxa and their distribution across western North America. We crowd-sourced the collection of specimens (n = 8272) via outreach to biologists in the western United States and Canada. From that collection, we sequenced - at up to 2 mitochondrial and 2 nuclear genes - a subset (n = 4009) of specimens from most basins in the western United States, added sequences from public sequence databases,...

Butterfly bush (Buddleja sessiliflora) reaches its northern range in southeast Arizona and herbarium records document seven historic localities from Pima and Santa Cruz counties. We visited all populations between 2014 and 2018, except for one reported from the Tohono O’odham Nation to discover that five historic localities were verified to be extant, and an additional locality was discovered in 2018. A total of 22 plants were documented during this study. All surveyed populations are isolated to 6–15 m areas and contained between one and seven plants. No propagules were found, except for...

El estado de Sonora cuenta con 126 especies de mamíferos, de las cuales, 18 especies (14.2%) corresponden a carnívoros. El presente estudio se efectuó en Rancho “La Volanta”, ubicado a 18.6 kilómetros al noreste de Bacoachi, Sonora, en la Cuenca del Río Sonora, y colindando con Sierra Los Ajos, que forma parte de la APFF Bavispe, un área natural protegida federal. Este estudio se llevó a cabo bajo la técnica de foto-trampeo, con la cual fue posible obtener información durante las 24 horas del día y sin ser invasiva para la fauna silvestre. Se instalaron 12 cámaras-trampas en 12 sitios...

La Reserva Jaguar del Norte (RJN) se creó en 2003 con la finalidad de proteger la población más norteña de jaguar (Panthera onca), y a otras especies igualmente importantes que habitan en el territorio de esa región. Con el propósito de generar información de la población de felinos silvestres: jaguar, puma (Puma concolor), ocelote (Leopardus pardalis), y gato montes (Lynx rufus) se realizaron monitoreos con 92 cámaras-trampa dentro de la RJN. Se obtuvo un esfuerzo de muestreo de 21,170 días-cámaras para los siete periodos en los que se dividió el estudio (enero-diciembre del 2014). Se...

There are 55 Sky Island mountain ranges or mountain complexes connected by oak woodland corridors in the Madrean Archipelgo between the Sierra Madre Occidental in Sonora and the Mogollon Rim in Arizona. Thirty-two of them ar in Sonora, Mexico. In 2009 Sky Island Alliance began the Madrean Archipelago Biodiversity Assessment (MABA) Program to document the biodiversity of Sonoran Sky Islands. MABA biotic inventory Expeditions explored nine Sky islands, and Mini-Expedtions to three other areas. All observations of animals and plants are publicly available in the MABA database. In 2015...