Treesearch

This report traces the flow of Montana’s 2018 timber harvest through the primary wood-using industries; provides a description of the structure, capacity, and condition of Montana’s primary forest products industry; and quantifies volumes and uses of wood fiber. Historical wood products industry changes are discussed, as well as changes in harvest, production, employment, and sales. objectives.

Suppression of most wildland fire ignitions has defined fire management in the United States since 1935. These past suppression activities, along with climate change impacts and other factors, have resulted in longer fire seasons and increased frequency of large fires in many forest ecosystems across the western United States, thus resulting in a fire management crisis. But suppression has not been the default approach in a few large wilderness areas of the U.S. Northern Rocky Mountains: the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, and the Frank Church-River of No...

For centuries, humans occupied and altered California Park, a unique high-elevation rangeland in northwestern Colorado. The area’s rich biodiversity attracted Native American hunters and successive European-American cattlemen, sheepherders, homesteaders, and recreationists. All of these groups influenced the area’s plant and animal composition and diversity, but heavy cattle and sheep grazing from the 1870s into the 1940s had a drastic and lasting impact on California Park. The area became part of the National Forest System in 1905 and since then the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest...

Exotic plant invasions alter ecosystem properties and threaten ecosystem functions globally. Interannual climate variability (ICV) influences both plant community composition (PCC) and soil properties, and interactions between ICV and PCC may influence nitrogen (N) and carbon (C) pools. We asked how ICV and non-native annual grass invasion covary to influence soil and plant N and C in a semiarid shrubland undergoing widespread ecosystem transformation due to invasions and altered fire regimes. We sampled four progressive stages of annual grass invasion at 20 sites across a large (25,000...

Long-term observations inform relationships among changes in vegetation, climate, and land use. For the eastern United States, I compared the timing of tree change, comprised of density and diversity increases, with the timing of climate change, as measured by change point detection of the Palmer Modified Drought Index (PMDI) that accounts for water balance, in two prairie ecological provinces, four grassland landscapes, and four forest landscapes. Historical evidence supplied documentation of tree density increases between approximately 1860 and 1890 in the two prairie provinces of...

Wildfire is a major driver of nitrogen (N) cycling and export from terrestrial to aquatic systems. While fire is a natural process in many watersheds, it can still degrade water quality by rapidly flushing N to streams. This can be particularly problematic in watersheds that experience high levels of N deposition or where climate change is promoting larger and more severe fires. The extent and duration of postfire N export, and the potential consequences for downstream water quality, depend on how N inputs, internal cycling, and outputs vary before, during, and after fire. Here we review...

Science communication and delivery seeks to bridge the gap between academic research and practice on the ground, and bring new science into the field to inform how forested lands are managed. Successful scientific outreach, and subsequent integration of new knowledge into land management, is a continuous, iterative process that can serve to improve communication and relationships across agencies and organizations for the long term. When successful, this exchange also informs and improves academic research capacity to better address pertinent management and policy practitioner needs. A key...

Mercury mining and its use in gold mine operations left a legacy of contamination in northern California. Contaminated sediments and water continue to affect local and downstream ecosystems. To assess the efficacy of biochar-amended soils on decreasing Hg transport, biochar was used to amend rock and sediment columns and mesocosms to decrease suspended sediment and associated mercury (Hg) in storm water runoff from Sierra Nevada hydraulic mines. Mercury-contaminated storm water runoff and hydraulic mine debris were collected from two hydraulic mine sites in the Yuba River, California...

In 2016, the USDA Forest Service, the largest wildfire management organization in the world, initiated the risk management assistance (RMA) program to improve the quality of strategic decision-making on its largest and most complex wildfire events. RMA was designed to facilitate a more formal risk management process, including the use of the best available science and emerging research tools, evaluation of alternative strategies, consideration of the likelihood of achieving objectives, and analysis of tradeoffs across a diverse range of incident objectives. RMA engaged personnel from a...

Wildfires pose a significant challenge to the natural and the built environments, as well as the safety and economic well-being of the communities residing in wildfire-prone areas. The electric power grid is specifically among the built environments most affected by, and contributing to, wildfires. In this paper, we propose a three lines of defense (3LD) framework for wildfire risk management in electric power infrastructure and review the literature from this lens. An overview of the physics and phenomenology of the wildfires as it relates to power grids is presented, and the logic for...