Treesearch

Rapid response is critical following natural disasters like wildfire. Fire, runoff, and erosion risks are highly heterogeneous in space, creating an urgent need for rapid, spatially-explicit assessment. In the past, data preparation has been time consuming and expensive, resulting in extensive losses in values-at-risk (VARs). The Rapid Response Erosion Database (RRED, http://rred.mtri.org/rred/) allows researchers and land managers to access properly-formatted spatial model inputs for the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) anywhere within the continental US and eventually beyond....

Negative imagery of destruction may induce or inhibit action to reduce risks from climate-exacerbated hazards, such as wildfires. This has generated conflicting assumptions among experts who communicate with homeowners: half of surveyed wildfire practitioners perceive a lack of expert agreement about the effect of negative imagery (a burning house) on homeowner behavior, yet most believe negative imagery is more engaging. We tested whether this expectation matched homeowner response in the United States. In an online experiment, homeowners who viewed negative imagery reported more negative...

Should wilderness be understood as primarily untrammeled or primarily natural? In this paper, we examine the conceptual and philosophical roots of untrammeled and natural in the context of the 1964 Wilderness Act and show how in some situations tension can arise between them, leading to a stewardship dilemma and subsequent debate over the future conservation role of wilderness. After showing that this debate is ultimately rooted in a false dichotomy, we offer a conceptual framework that presents managers with the tools necessary to shepherd the wilderness idea through the changing environme...

Mature forests provide important wildlife habitat and support critical ecosystem functions globally. Within the dry conifer forests of the western United States, past management and fire exclusion have contributed to forest conditions susceptible to increasingly severe wildfire and drought. We evaluated declines in conifer forest cover in the southern Sierra Nevada of California during a decade of record disturbance by using spatially comprehensive forest structure estimates, wildfire perimeter data, and the eDaRT forest disturbance tracking algorithm. Primarily due to the combination of...

Serotinous cones, those that remain closed until heated, confer post-disturbance resilience on many lodgepole pine forests throughout the Southern Rockies. The record-breaking extent of wildfires in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming in 2020 raised concerns about tree regeneration in areas where crown fires burned lodgepole pine stands that had experienced high levels of mortality during bark beetle outbreaks occurring more than a decade previously. We measured seed germination and assessed the relationship between cone age and seed viability for serotinous cones on beetle-killed...

The behavioral mechanisms by which predators encounter prey are poorly resolved. In particular, the extent to which predators engage in active search for prey versus incidentally encountering them has not been well studied in many systems and particularly not for neonate prey during the birth pulse. Parturition of many large herbivores occurs during a short and predictable temporal window in which young are highly vulnerable to predation. Our study aims to determine how a suite of carnivores responds to the seasonal pulse of newborn ungulates using contemporaneous global positioning system...

Monitoring of tree spatial arrangement is increasingly essential for restoration of dry conifer forests. The presented method was developed for high-density point clouds, like those from unmanned aerial system imagery, to extract and model individual tree location, height, and diameter at breast height (DBH). Extraction of tree locations and heights uses a variable window function searching point cloud-derived canopy height models. Tree DBH is extracted for a subset of point cloud trees using a slice at 1.32-1.42 m and a least-squares circle fitting algorithm. Extracted heights and DBHs...

(1) Background: Federal land managers in the US are charged with risk-based decision-making which requires them to know the risk and to direct resources accordingly. Without understanding the specific factors that produce risk, it is difficult to identify strategies to reduce it. (2) Methods: Risk characterized by U.S. land managers during wildfires was evaluated from 2010-2017 to identify factors driving risk perceptions. Annotation from 282 wildfires in two regions with distinctive risk profiles, the Northwest and Southwest Geographic Areas, were qualitatively coded using the risk...

Cairpol and Aeroqual air quality sensors measuring CO, CO2, NO2, and other species were tested on fresh biomass burning plumes in field and laboratory environments. We evaluated the sensors by comparing 1 min sensor measurements to collocated reference instrument measurements. The sensors were evaluated based on the coefficient of determination (r2) between the sensor and reference measurements, as well as by the accuracy, collocated precision, root mean square error (RMSE), and other metrics. In general, CO and CO2 sensors performed well (in terms of accuracy and r2 values) compared to...

Wildland firefighters must be able to maintain situational awareness to ensure their safety. Crew members, including lookouts and crew building handlines, rely on visibility to assess risk and communicate changing conditions. Geographic information systems and remote sensing offer potential solutions for characterizing visibility using models incorporating terrain and vegetation height. Visibility can be assessed using viewshed algorithms, and while previous research has demonstrated the utility of these algorithms across multiple fields, their use in wildland firefighter safety has yet to...