Treesearch

Remote sensing is widely used to detect forest disturbances (e.g., wildfires, harvest, or outbreaks of pathogens or insects) over spatiotemporal scales that are infeasible to capture with field surveys. To understand forest ecosystem dynamics and the ecological role of human and natural disturbances, researchers and managers would like to characterize spatiotemporal patterns of several types of disturbance. Recent advances include the development and testing of algorithms to automatically detect and attribute an array of disturbance types across large forest landscapes from remotely sensed...

The authors are a team of fire whirl researchers who have been actively studying whirls and large-scale wildland fires by directly observing them through fire-fighting efforts and applying theory, scale modeling, and numerical simulations in fire research. This multidisciplinary research-background team previously conducted scale model experiments to reconstruct hazardous large-scale fires in the laboratory, then conducted numerical simulations and developed fundamental theories to translate these findings into a basic understanding of combustion science and fluid dynamics. This article, a...

In the 2020 fire season, the fire management community developed and tested a wide range of new practices to meet challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic. To better understand the effectiveness of different innovations and which should be considered for more permanent use, we surveyed Interagency Hotshot Crew (IHC) superintendents in January 2021. We focused on identifying innovations that, regardless of COVID-19, the IHCs would want to keep and why, as well as those that proved problematic. The survey focused on paperwork, briefings, and fire camp and incident command post setup....

Now over twenty years into the 21st century, it is suggested that we are entering a new era of wilderness visitor use management (VUM). Yet, we lack a recent review of the literature assessing the latest research trends to advance wilderness VUM in a meaningful way. Accordingly, this research serves as both a review of the last twenty years of U.S. wilderness VUM research and a launching point into the next era. Our assessment adds to several previous benchmarks that demonstrate the progress of wilderness VUM research. This review evaluates trends in methodologies and themes of inquiry...

Wildfires are increasing in scale and impact on the landscape, altering large amounts of wildlife habitat and forest ecosystems. The reduction of fuels through forest management is considered a primary way to reduce the extent and severity of wildfires before they occur but may lead to a decrease in tree density prohibitive of some species’ habitat. Alternatively, management actions undertaken after a fire may speed the trajectory of burned areas back into quality habitat but may also impede this development if the wrong type of treatment is undertaken. Thus, information on how different...

Precipitation is a key driver of primary production worldwide, but primary production does not always track year-to-year variation in precipitation linearly. Instead, plant responses to changes in precipitation may exhibit time lags, or legacies of past precipitation. Legacies can be driven by multiple mechanisms, including persistent changes in plant physiological and morphological traits and changes to the physical environment, such as plant access to soil water. We used three precipitation manipulation experiments in central Texas, USA to evaluate the magnitude, duration, and potential...

Plants demonstrate a broad range of responses to environmental shifts. One of the most remarkable responses is plasticity, which is the ability of a single plant genotype to produce different phenotypes in response to environmental stimuli. As with all traits, the ability of plasticity to evolve depends on the presence of underlying genetic diversity within a population. A common approach for evaluating the role of genetic variation in driving differences in plasticity has been to study genotype-by-environment interactions (G x E). G x E occurs when genotypes produce different phenotypic...

Maximizing the effectiveness of fuel treatments at landscape scales is a key research and management need given the inability to treat all areas at risk from wildfire. We synthesized information from case studies that documented the influence of fuel treatments on wildfire events. We used a systematic review to identify relevant case studies and extracted information through a series of targeted questions to summarize experiential knowledge of landscape fuel treatment effectiveness. Within a larger literature search, we identified 18 case study reports that included (1) manager assessment...

Ecosystem transformations to altered or novel ecological states are accelerating across the globe. Indicators of ecological resilience to disturbance and resistance to invasion can aid in assessing risks and prioritizing areas for conservation and restoration. The sagebrush biome encompasses parts of 11 western states and is experiencing rapid transformations due to human population growth, invasive species, altered disturbance regimes, and climate change. We built on prior use of static soil moisture and temperature regimes to develop new, ecologically relevant and climate responsive...

A key uncertainty of empirical models of post-fire tree mortality is understanding the drivers of elevated post-fire mortality several years following fire, known as delayed mortality. Delayed mortality can represent a substantial fraction of mortality, particularly for large trees that are a conservation focus in western US coniferous forests. Current post-fire tree mortality models have undergone limited evaluation of how injury level and time since fire interact to influence model accuracy and predictor variable importance. Less severe injuries potentially serve as an indicator for...