Treesearch

WEPPcloud - European Union (EU) is an online interface of the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model designed to predict streamflow and sediments in European forested watersheds. Although designed to be run in any location in Europe, its performance has not yet been evaluated against observed data. This study evaluates WEPPcloud - EU's performance in simulating streamflow and suspended sediment yield for two burned catchments, Ermida and Serra de Cima, in continental Portugal during the first year after the fire. The default parameters significantly underestimated streamflow and...

Wolverine (Gulo gulo) and Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis), listed as threatened under the United States Endangered Species Act, inhabit remote mountainous terrain across multiple western states. To address challenges associated with collecting long-term occupancy and demographic data for both species, we developed and tested a modified non-invasive camera and hair snag (C&H) monitoring system for simultaneous long-term monitoring of wolverine and Canada lynx (lynx hereafter). We aimed to adapt wolverine monitoring for concurrent use with lynx; redesign the data collection framework and...

Understanding wildlife responses to human disturbance is essential for developing effective conservation and management strategies. Grizzly bears in the southern Canadian Rocky Mountains face increasing habitat alteration from roads, forest harvest, human settlements, and mining, which can alter the way animals move through the landscape. Deleterious effects on genetic exchange, demographic connectivity, and access to key resources can occur if movements are dramatically altered. We used integrated step-selection functions (iSSF) to model movement and habitat selection for 109 GPS-collared...

Comprehensive monitoring of biodiversity to direct conservation action is foundational to addressing the ongoing biodiversity crisis. As integrative monitoring programs increasingly come online in response to multilateral biodiversity agreements, establishing best practices for optimal design is critical. Appropriately selecting monitoring locations is fundamental for producing robust biodiversity data. Despite extensive development of algorithms to systematically select sites, practical discussions of which algorithm is optimal for different monitoring settings is largely absent from the...

Successive catastrophic wildfire seasons in western North America have escalated the urgency around reducing fire risk to communities and ecosystems. In historically frequent-fire forests, fuel buildup as a result of fire exclusion is contributing to increased fire severity. The probability of high-severity fire can be reduced by active forest management that reduces fuels, prompting federal and state agencies to commit significant resources to increase the pace and scale of fuel reduction treatments. However, lower severity areas of wildfires also have the potential to act as “treatments,”...

Critically burnt slopes are treated after a wildfire to reduce erosion and the impacts of eroded soil and ash on downstream water quality. Conventional post-wildfire erosion mitigation methods including mulch, barrier, and seeding treatments have some drawbacks that may result in low efficiency. Polymeric materials, xanthan gum (XG) and polyacrylamide (PAM), are shown to be effective alternatives to the conventional methods in controlling post-wildfire erosion of bare soil. This study evaluates the use of XG and PAM for controlling post-wildfire erosion when the soil surface is covered...

Although half of Earth’s population resides in the wildland-urban interface, human exposure to wildland fires remains unquantified. We show that the population directly exposed to wildland fires increased 40% globally from 2002 to 2021 despite a 26% decline in burned area. Increased exposure was mainly driven by enhanced colocation of wildland fires and human settlements, doubling the exposure per unit burned area. We show that population dynamics accounted for 25% of the 440 million human exposures to wildland fires. Although wildfire disasters in North America, Europe, and Oceania have...

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is an emerging sustainable construction material with the potential to replace concrete. Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been widely applied to quantify the environmental impact of CLT materials and buildings. However, current research on CLT LCA mainly focuses on softwoods, lacking reports on hardwood CLT. Despite the less frequent utilization of hardwood by CLT manufacturers, hardwood CLT is technically feasible and provides value-added uses for low-quality timber. This study developed a cradle-to-gate life cycle modeling framework to produce hardwood CLT in...

Wildlife monitoring technologies like passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) show great promise in overcoming biodiversity monitoring challenges over broad spatial scales. We demonstrate that PAM can be an effective monitoring approach for wildlife species and communities in the southwestern United States. After collecting >51,000 hours of audio data in the Cibola, Gila, and Kaibab National Forests, we processed data with the BirdNET algorithm. We confirmed that BirdNET can currently identify at least fifty-two species, including six species of management interest: the Mexican spotted owl...

Across ecosystems and biomes, most species in biological communities are rare. Many studies discount rare species when examining biodiversity patterns, assuming that common species are most influential for ecosystem functioning. There is growing evidence, however, that rare species contribute unique functions in many ecosystems; thus, discounting them produces misleading conclusions about how biodiversity is changing in the face of natural and anthropogenic forces. Rare species are more likely to be missed by multi-species sampling designs and are thus particularly vulnerable to detection...