Treesearch

The 1964 Wilderness Act is a landmark piece of legislation, providing robust protections from development, mechanization, and resource extraction to landscapes designated by the US Congress as federal wilderness. Today, the National Wilderness Preservation System, which includes 806 wilderness areas and 111 million acres, represents the world’s largest highly protected conservation network. However, a long-standing ethos of nonmanagement - exemplified by the philosophy that managers should be guardians but not gardeners - obscures long legacies of Indigenous stewardship and may not sustain...

Increasing ecological perturbations resulting from global change processes are altering the environmental predictability (EP) of critical forage and water resources for wildlife. While research has furthered our understanding of how EP both underlies and directs animal movement, studies have mainly focused on relationships between EP and large-scale movement behaviors (e.g. migration) at the species level, neglecting the mediating influence that environmental context has on the behavior of wide-ranging species. We address these knowledge gaps by examining how EP of forage in mule deer...

Escalating wildfire frequency and severity are altering wildland habitats worldwide. Yet investigations into fire impacts on wildlife habitat rarely extend to the macroecological scales relevant to species conservation and global change processes. We evaluate the effects of wildfire on habitat quality and selection by large mammals spanning three trophic levels in the Western United States. We analyze 12 years of GPS telemetry data for 2966 mule deer Odocoileus hemionus , 52 black bears Ursus americanus , and 74 cougars Puma concolor across Utah and Nevada, USA. Over 800 areas burned...

In arid and semiarid regions, extreme, extended droughts are becoming more frequent due to climate change. Drought is driving wildlife to seek out food or water resources where they are not as limited, such as in irrigated croplands. We collected GPS locations from 41 mule deer, a generalist herbivore reliant on primary productivity, within three study areas in Utah, USA, during a summer without drought conditions and a summer with extreme drought. This natural experiment provided an opportunity to assess how mule deer shifted their habitat selection, specifically whether drought increased...

Rising visitation to the Cleveland National Forest (CNF) has led the Forest Service to adopt the 2022 San Diego River Watershed Visitor Use Management Plan to balance recreation, resource protection, and visitor safety. High-use sites such as Three Sisters Falls and Cedar Creek Falls are priorities due to their urban proximity, wildfire potential, limited parking, quantity of Search and Rescue efforts, and status as two of the only accessible waterfalls in the county. Challenges include safety, crowding, and ecological impacts. Current strategies involve education, infrastructure, permits,...

Drylands experience highly variable and potentially unpredictable interannual climate patterns which can cause post-fire seedings to occur during years with unfavorable climatic conditions. Repeated annual seeding combined with higher seeding rates show promise to improve post-wildfire restoration outcomes in drylands by increasing the likelihood that seeding occurs during a year with favorable weather conditions and overcoming potential establishment barriers from lower seeding rates when weather conditions are favorable. While combining these two techniques is an expensive proposition at...

Translocations are the intentional movement of animals across landscapes for conservation purposes and are used as a common method for restoring populations. Fisher (Pekania pennanti) populations have been extensively reintroduced and augmented in the Western United States, often using multiple source populations. To date, little is known about the success of past translocation efforts for Fisher recovery in the West, nor what the effects of using distinct populations for translocations were on contemporary population composition and genetic diversity. To understand the effects of historic...

In 2023, a new generation of National Land Cover Database (NLCD) Tree Canopy Cover (TCC) data were produced that include annual 30m gridded time-series products for the Conterminous United States (CONUS). These NLCD TCC v2021.4 products have more frequent time steps, inter-annual coherency, lower product release latency, improved accuracy, uncertainty metrics, and documentation over previous versions. Our methodology leveraged Google Earth Engine (GEE) to generate annual time-series composites from Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery that were used to predict annual pixel-wise TCC. Next, we...

Increasing participation in outdoor recreation is driving elevated levels of human presence in wildlands. If properly managed, outdoor recreation can benefit conservation goals while providing the public with numerous benefits. However, balancing increased demand for recreation opportunities and maintaining ecological integrity can pose difficult tradeoffs for managers. As such, there is a need for additional data-driven resources to help inform land management decisions. Traditional approaches of measuring recreational use, such as trail counters, are costly, labor intensive, and lack the...

The Fire Effects Information System is a publicly available, searchable website with over 1,400 comprehensive literature syntheses on fire-related topics. It is maintained by a team of ecologists, writers, and editors who pore through and synthesize thousands of publications on the biology, ecology, and fire ecology of species and ecosystems to produce evidence-based literature reviews that land managers can rely on for decision support. The team continuously writes and updates these reviews, making FEIS a dynamic resource.