Treesearch

Ecological restoration commonly emphasizes reestablishing native plant communities. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that actively restoring plant communities can passively restore structure and function of other community components like wildlife. However, this assumption is rarely tested. We evaluated how plant restoration in grasslands of the northwestern Unites States affected the structure (composition and relative abundance) of native small mammal communities and the important functional role they play as seed predators. We quantified vegetation, small mammal community...

Pyrodiversity is the spatial or temporal variability in fire effects across a landscape. Multiple ecological hypotheses, when applied to the context of post-fire systems, suggest that high pyrodiversity will lead to high biodiversity. This resultant “pyrodiversity-biodiversity” hypothesis has grown popular but has received mixed support by recent empirical research. In this paper, we sought to review the existing pyrodiversity literature, appraise support for the pyrodiversity-biodiversity hypothesis, examine potential mechanisms underlying the hypothesis and identify outstanding questions...

With the increasing frequency and severity of fire, there is an increasing desire to better manage fuels and minimize, as much as possible, the impacts of fire on soils and other natural resources. Piling and/or burning slash is one method of managing fuels and reducing the risk and consequences of wildfire, but the repercussions to the soil, although very localized, can be significant and often irreversible. In an effort to provide a tool to better understand the impact of fire on soils, this study outlines the improvements to and the in situ validation of a nonequilibrium model for...

This document provides a review of Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park’s (SEKI) trail-use monitoring program. We evaluate how SEKI monitors and quantifies wilderness encounter rates, which serve as a measure of impacts to visitors’ opportunities for solitude. This review of SEKI’s monitoring approach has three core objectives: (1) determine if SEKI’s monitoring methodology aligns with established practices in the literature; (2) explore different trends in SEKI’s monitoring data; and (3) provide opportunities for advancing both future monitoring protocol and future analyses.

Global change has resulted in chronic shifts in fire regimes. Variability in the sensitivity of tree communities to multi-decadal changes in fire regimes is critical to anticipating shifts in ecosystem structure and function, yet remains poorly understood. Here, we address the overall effects of fire on tree communities and the factors controlling their sensitivity in 29 sites that experienced multi-decadal alterations in fire frequencies in savanna and forest ecosystems across tropical and temperate regions. Fire had a strong overall effect on tree communities, with an average fire...

Adaptive traits can be dramatically altered by genome duplication. The study of interactions among traits, ploidy, and the environment are necessary to develop an understanding of how polyploidy affects niche differentiation and to develop restoration strategies for resilient native ecosystems. Methods: Growth and fecundity were measured in common gardens for 39 populations of big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) containing two subspecies and two ploidy levels. General linear mixed‐effect models assessed how much of the trait variation could be attributed to genetics (i.e., ploidy and...

Interactions between neighboring plants are critical for biodiversity maintenance in plant populations and communities. Intraspecific trait variation and genome duplication are common in plant species and can drive eco-evolutionary dynamics through genotypemediated plant-plant interactions. However, few studies have examined how species-wide intraspecific variation may alter interactions between neighboring plants. We investigate how subspecies and ploidy variation in a genetically diverse species, big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), can alter the demographic outcomes of plant interaction...

While urban areas are being threatened by water shortage due to climate change and rapid population growth, effects of urban development patterns on future municipal water shortage are rarely investigated. We address this aspect of urbanization by assessing the impacts of sprawl vs. high-density patterns on future changes in the sub-annual water shortage intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) relationships. The City of Fort Collins, Colorado, water supply system is chosen as a representative region that is rapidly developing over the last decades. The future water supply is estimated using the...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) acquisitions provide piecemeal coverage across the western US, as collections are organized by local managers of individual project areas. In this study, we analyze different factors that can contribute to developing a regional strategy to use information from completed ALS data acquisitions and develop maps of multiple forest attributes in new ALS project areas in a rapid manner. This study is located in Oregon, USA, and analyzes six forest structural attributes for differences between: (1) synthetic (i.e., not‐calibrated), and calibrated predictions, (2)...

Stands are the primary unit for tactical and operational forest planning. Forest managers can use remote-sensing-based forest inventories to precisely estimate attributes of interest at the stand scale. However, remote-sensing-based inventories typically rely on models relating remote-sensing information to forest attributes for fixed area plots with accurate coordinates. The collection of that kind of ground data is expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, remote-sensing-based inventories provide precise descriptions of the forest when the remote-sensing data were collected, but they...