Treesearch

A new GTR reviews timber harvest operations and their effects on soil sustainability to help forest managers understand and limit impacts and allow national forests to continue to produce ecosystem services and goods.

TreeMap is a new tree-level model of U.S. forests developed to support analysis of wildfire risk to carbon. It has a range of other management applications, from inventorying wildlife habitat to modeling the impacts of fuel treatments.

Part of these projections includes a separate assessment of annual herbaceous yield (e.g., cheatgrass), enabling managers to “see into the future.” These data are produced automatically on a weekly basis and are ready for managers and planners right now.

Across the Intermountain West, snowpack in forested headwaters is the primary, if not sole, water supply source for many communities. And the forests themselves play a crucial role in maintaining the snowpack and helping to deliver high-quality water to downstream communities.

Open forests, once common in the eastern United States, are defined by a fire-resistant overstory of trees and a diverse herbaceous layer that can be maintained by frequent low-intensity fires. These forests started disappearing with land-use changes and widespread management practices and are now rare in the landscape; many species associated with these forests have been lost or are on the decline. Restoration of open forests for the long term includes management of the herbaceous layer, continuity of the overstory, and managing tree regeneration, which can be accomplished with fire,...

Forest management at the Lick Creek Demonstration-Research Forest in the Northern Rocky Mountains of Montana has been documented in photographs since the early 1900s and since 1991 of the cut/burn treatments. These replicated photos show how quickly dry forests in the Rockies can change.

Timing is everything, especially when it comes to the complex ecological interactions between plants and the environment. For range managers concerned with maintaining the integrity and productivity of rangelands, it is critical to monitor the seasonal development and condition of grasses and other vegetation on which cattle graze.

The 193 million acres managed by the Forest Service play a significant role in the United States’ mitigation of climate change by serving the dual role of removing carbon from the atmosphere and providing long-term carbon storage. In acknowledgment of the importance of these lands, the 2012 Forest Planning Rule requires forest management plans to address how management activities will affect carbon stocks. However, when the rule was adopted, there weren’t baseline carbon stock estimates readily available to forest managers, nor was it fully understood how management activities or disturbanc...

In Colorado, cumulative spruce beetle outbreaks over the past few decades have resulted in dead and dying spruce-dominated forests across state, private, and federal lands. Among the landscapes hardest hit is southern Colorado’s Rio Grande National Forest; approximately 85 percent of the mature spruce comprising its subalpine forests has been killed by the beetles. These subalpine forests are critical to the persistence of the federally threatened Canada lynx reintroduced onto the forest beginning in 1999.

Across the western United States, pinyon and juniper woodlands are undergoing significant changes that are of concern to land managers and the communities who depend on them. In some areas, the woodlands are expanding, resulting in increased fuel loads, risk of more severe fires, and loss of high value habitat for species such as greater sage grouse. In other areas, these woodlands are contracting due to human development, more severe droughts, and larger wildfires. RMRS scientists and their partners synthesized over 1,000 research and management papers on pinyon and juniper woodlands in...