Treesearch

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service released a new 10-year plan, Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests, to substantially reduce fire risk across the country. The Wildfire Crisis Strategy calls for ramping up forest treatments on Federal, State, Tribal, and private lands well above current levels. Public and stakeholder engagement, consultation, and collaboration are critical to successful implementation of the strategy. Best available science can inform how to...

Westslope cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii lewisi, WCT) were highly valued by Idaho’s Indigenous people and subsequent immigrants. Historically, WCT were extremely abundant, widely distributed, and the dominant trout in central and northern Idaho. Early 20th-century anglers enjoyed exceptional fishing; St. Joe River anglers reported WCT catches of 35 pounds in 1 hour! Despite restricted harvest and habitat protections since 1899, many Idaho WCT populations declined, primarily from habitat degradation and excessive harvest. By the 1960s, WCT in several major drainages were on the brink...

The request from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service’s Region 5 to Area Command Team (ACT) 2 was straightforward: Identify potential gaps between wildfire resource needs and resource availability for October through December 2020. The Fire Weather Outlook at this time was predicting that parts of California and the Southwest would see higher-than-usual fire activity into the fall and winter. In preparation for the worst-case scenario, the region needed to identify the regional and national availability of personnel and equipment, including crews, engines, aircraft, and...

Field-based transplant gardens, including common and reciprocal garden experiments, are a powerful tool for studying genetic variation and gene-by- environment interactions. These experiments assume that individuals within the garden represent independent replicates growing in a homogenous environment. Plant neighborhood interactions are pervasive across plant populations and could violate assumptions of transplant garden experiments. We demonstrate how spatially explicit models for plant–plant interactions can provide novel insights on genotypes' performance in field-transplant garden...

One of the most fundamental yet challenging tasks for aquatic ecologists is to precisely delineate the range of species, particularly those that are broadly distributed, require specialized sampling methods, and may be simultaneously declining and increasing in different portions of their range. An exemplar is the Pacific lamprey Entosphenus tridentatus, a jawless anadromous fish of conservation concern that is actively managed in many coastal basins in western North America. To efficiently determine its distribution across the accessible 56,168 km of the upper Snake River basin in the...

Approaches in molecular genetics, metagenomics, and metabarcoding offer promise of further insights into disease caused by P. noxius. These genetic approaches may assist in developing disease management methods by examining pathogen inoculum levels and changes in microbial communities in response to management treatments.

The continuity and depth of the surface litter and duff layers are major drivers of fire spread and fuel consumption. Nevertheless, its spatially explicit quantification over relatively large areas remains unresolved: local fuel heterogeneity introduces large uncertainties in estimates derived from field-based models and sparse data samples. Besides that, the sensitivity of remote sensors to surface litter loads is limited, particularly under canopy cover. In fire-maintained pine forests of the Southeastern US, surface fuel accumulation and its distribution over the forest floor are mainly...

The global biodiversity crisis is escalating rapidly, with nearly a million species facing extinction risk in the near future. Monitoring of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBV; key variables measured to detect changes in biodiversity) over time is important for biodiversity conservation, which in turn necessitates baseline estimates of EBVs. Using camera-trap data for six years (2013-2018) and a Bayesian multispecies occupancy model, we estimated species richness and species-specific occupancy of a mammalian community in Pakke Tiger Reserve, India. We detected 28 species of mammals in...

Forest fuel inventory, monitoring and mapping provide the basis for fuel management activities, including assessing wildfire hazards and risk, prescribed fire planning, designing silvicultural treatments, and predicting fire behaviour and effects at various scales. One of the most significant challenges in developing accurate surface fuel maps is capturing the spatial variability of fuel load within and between different fuel components. In this paper, we compare the performance of four spatial interpolation methods for estimating and mapping fine-scale fuel load in a dry mixed conifer...

Natural resource planners face the challenging task of sustaining the diverse range of human-nature relationships supported by mountain systems. Planners of the Flathead Wild and Scenic River system cannot reasonably consider and communicate each individual human-nature relationship in the planning process. We present a social science approach that facilitates public engagement by having members of the interested public prioritize human and ecological meanings and services. Statistical analysis distills the diverse range of human-nature relationships into a limited number to be considered...