Treesearch

The remote sensing of fire severity and burned area is fundamental in the evaluation of fire impacts. The current study aimed to: (i) compare Sentinel-2 (S2) spectral indices to predict field-observed fire severity in Durango, Mexico; (ii) evaluate the effect of the compositing period (1 or 3 months), techniques (average or minimum), and phenological correction (constant offset, c, against a novel relative phenological correction, rc) on fire severity mapping, and (iii) determine fire perimeter accuracy. The Relative Burn Ratio (RBR), using S2 bands 8a and 12, provided the best corresponden...

Beginning in 1973, the National Silviculture Workshop (NSW) purposely brought together USDA Forest Service scientists from Research and Development and forest managers from the National Forest System to meet face-to-face to build a science and management partnership in silviculture. Recently, scientists from universities and other partners have joined this annual gathering. The 2022 NSW theme is “Foundational Concepts in Silviculture: Emphasis on Reforestation and Early Stand Improvement.” In 2022, the workshop is scheduled to take place in Kellogg, Idaho and is being jointly hosted by the...

Recent increases in area burned, combined with poor natural regeneration in some areas, have promoted concerns about widespread forest losses throughout the western U.S. Postfire reforestation is one strategy commonly employed by land managers and land owners to facilitate forest recovery, but the area in need of planting only becomes larger each year. The Southern Rockies Reforestation Tool (SRRT) is a simple web-mapping tool that was developed to help prioritize sites for postfire reforestation. This tool can be used to develop maps of fire severity and seedling suitability for ponderosa...

We used historical and contemporary survey data to assess the dynamics in two old-growth forests at Savage Mountain, Maryland, versus secondary forests from the surrounding landscape of the northern Allegheny Mountain Plateau (AMP). This is the first published compilation of witness trees from western Maryland. The oldgrowth forests on Savage Mountain, Maryland, are presently dominated by mixed oak (Quercus spp. L.; 42%), red maple (Acer rubrum L.), and black birch (Betula lenta L.). Witness trees (1620-1825) from Savage Mountain were dominated by mixed oak (55%), hickory (Carya spp.;...

The regulation of seasonality has been an area of interest for decades, yet global climate change has created extra urgency in the quest to understand how sensory circuits and neuroendocrine control systems interact to generate flexibility in biological timekeeping. The capacity of temperature to alter endogenous or photoperiod-regulated neuroendocrine mechanisms driving seasonality, either as a direct cue or through temperature-dependent effects on energy and metabolism, is at the heart of this phenological flexibility. However, until relatively recently, little research had been done on...

Biological organisms are increasingly being introduced and eradicated in an effort to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem function in the face of anthropogenic threats. However, these conservation actions can have unintended consequences to non-target species. Careful vetting of these actions using ecological modelling tools could help predict and avoid unintended consequences.

Animal conservation requires understanding animal-habitat relationships. The integration of novel remote sensing platforms such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology has dramatically improved the resolution of insight when evaluating animal-habitat relationships by characterizing forest structure. However, conventional LiDAR collection (e.g., airborne or terrestrial laser scanning) may be limited by small spatial extents and logistical constraints (e.g., budget) associated with sampling. NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission provides an alternative and...

The long-term outcome from accelerated forest restoration using resource objective wildfire in combination with fuel management on fire-excluded landscapes is not well studied. We used simulation modeling to examine long-term trade-offs and synergies of alternative land management strategies by combining two wildfire management alternatives with three levels of contemporary forest restoration treatments on a 778,000-ha landscape over 56 years. We found that managing wildfires for resource objectives diminished the likelihood of irregular fire events over time by making wildfire activity...

No common global definition exists of urban populations, resulting in a lack of shared standards across countries for equivalent comparisons. Therefore, I used global population models of Landscan, Worldpop, and Gridded Population of the World to generate a provisional classification of population density classes to define urban and rural by human population densities, which is an enduring attribute to differentiate urban lands from rural lands. I calibrated 2015 population density models to the United Nations 2015 global urban population estimate of 53.9% and then balanced among the...

White pines (Pinus, subgenus Strobus) in North America are highly vulnerable to the native mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae), invasive white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola), and consequences of altered disturbance regimes, with sugar pine (Pinus lambertiana) being among the most in peril. Radial thinning treatments reflect an effort to balance the needs of late seral, high forest cover for some wildlife species with the desire to also promote habitat for species requiring higher light and lower competition, as well as to create heterogenous forest structure that can be...