Treesearch

The COVID-19 global pandemic created dramatic change in nearly every facet of life, including how the Forest Service worked to fulfill its mission despite facing multiple unknowns fraught with risks. Preparing for and responding to wildland fire while reducing the likelihood that wildland fire responders would be exposed to COVID-19 created an unprecedented challenge.

In 2022 the US Forest Service launched an ambitious 10-year strategy to address the escalating wildfire danger in the U.S. “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests” includes a 10-year plan to substantially increase the scale of forest health and risk reduction fuel treatments over the next decade. The plan expands and prioritizes treatments on 20 million acres on National Forest System lands, and 30 million acres of other federal, state, tribal, and private lands, targeting lands where wildfire ignitions will...

Land management legacies coupled with climate change have led to shifts in western ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forest structure and fire regimes. A growing body of evidence suggests that under increasing area burned at high-severity, warming and drought, ponderosa pine forests are vulnerable to conversion to alternate forest types or non-forest vegetation. However, the extent and direction of recent fire-induced changes in southwestern US ponderosa pine forests have not been subject to region-wide evaluation. Here, we assess recent fire effects in ponderosa pine forests using long-term...

Since 1972, the Landsat program has been continually monitoring the Earth, to now provide 50 years of digital, multispectral, medium spatial resolution observations. Over this time, Landsat data were crucial for many scientific and technical advances. Prior to the Landsat program, detailed, synoptic depictions of the Earth's surface were rare, and the ability to acquire and work with large datasets was limited. The early years of the Landsat program delivered a series of technological breakthroughs, pioneering new methods, and demonstrating the ability and capacity of digital satellite...

Sagebrush ecosystems of western North America are threatened by invasive annual grasses and wildfires that can remove fire-intolerant shrubs for decades. Fuel reduction treatments are used ostensibly to aid in fire suppression, conserve wildlife habitat, and restore historical fire regimes, but longterm ecological impacts of these treatments are not clear. In 2006, we initiated fuel reduction treatments (prescribed fire, mowing, and herbicide applications [tebuthiuron and imazapic]) in six Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis communities. We evaluated long-term effects of these fuel...

Falling trees and tree fragments are one of the top five causes of fatalities for wildland fire responders. In six out of ten recent years, at least one fatality from a tree strike has occurred while a fire responder was on duty, and others were injured. We used TreeMap, a national map of forest characteristics, including individual tree height, diameter, and status (live or dead), to generate a map of snag hazard for forested areas of the continental U.S. at 30 x 30 m resolution. Snag hazard was classified into categories of low, moderate, high, or extreme based on snag density and...

Forest change affects the relative magnitudes of hydrologic fluxes such as evapotranspiration (ET) and streamflow. However, much is unknown about the sensitivity of streamflow response to forest disturbance and recovery. Several physically based models recognize the different influences that overstory versus understory canopies exert on hydrologic processes, yet most input datasets consist of total leaf area index (LAI) rather than individual canopy strata. Here, we developed stratum-specific LAI datasets with the intent of improving the representation of vegetation for ecohydrologic...

Metrosideros polymorpha, Hawaiian common name ‘ōhi‘a, is the dominant tree of Hawaiian forests, comprising 80% of the native forests and 50% of all forests in the state (Owen et al., in press; US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, n.d.). ‘Ōhi‘a trees contain 41% of all live-tree carbon sequestered on these islands (Owen et al., in press; US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, n.d.). Many ‘ōhi‘a forests are almost monospecific in the canopy, although they support a diverse and largely endemic understory. ‘Ōhi‘a is one of the first woody species to colonize new lava flows and...

The use of biomass from forests by humans has been practiced since the dawn of time. Such practices have resulted in severe watershed degradation historically and in today’s world. As modern society seeks alternative energy sources, they are once again turning to forests, but now use mechanized harvesting systems to remove the biomass and transport it to processing or utilization sites. This study investigated the impacts of different mechanized biomass operations on sediment displacement, soil hydraulic conductivity, and canopy interception to determine if severe watershed impacts...

Several plant traits are associated with resistance to fire, thus fire-resistant species may give rise to more fire-resistant landscapes. However, upscaling from plant traits to landscape- and regional-scale fire effects remains a challenge.