Treesearch

Douglas-fir beetle, Dendroctonus pseudotsugae Hopkins (DFB), is the most damaging insect pest of Douglas-fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco, in western North America. Individual high-value trees and stands can be protected during DFB outbreaks using the beetle's anti-aggregation pheromone, 3-methylcyclohex-2-en-1-one (MCH), which is available in several commercial formulations. However, other methylcyclohexanones similar in molecular structure to MCH have been shown to repel bees from agricultural areas. In forest systems, wild bees (Hymenoptera: Apiformes) provide essential...

Desarmillaria caespitosa, a North American vicariant species of European D. tabescens, is redescribed in detail based on recent collections from the USA and Mexico. This species is characterized by morphological features and multilocus phylogenetic analyses using portions of nuc rDNA 28S (28S), translation elongation factor 1-alpha (tef1), the second largest subunit of RNA polymerase II (rpb2), actin (act), and glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (gpd). A neotype of D. caespitosa is designated here. Morphological and genetic differences between D. caespitosa and D. tabescens were...

Key to the long-term resilience of dryland ecosystems is the recovery of foundation plant species following disturbance. In ecosystems with high interannual weather variability, understanding the influence of short-term environmental conditions on establishment of foundation species is essential for identifying vulnerable landscapes and developing restoration strategies. We asked how annual environmental conditions affect post-fire establishment of Artemisia tridentata, a shrub species that dominates landscapes across much of the western United States, and evaluated the influence of...

We examined tradeoffs between managing for fire resilience versus economic objectives for a large scale (240,000 ha) federal collaborative forest restoration project in the southwestern United States - the Four Forest Restoration Initiative - created to improve fire resilience in fire-adapted ponderosa pine forests that have experienced a century of fire exclusion. However, scaling up forest restoration to substantially change fuels and future fire behavior over large areas is constrained by marginal economic returns from harvested materials. We simulated a range of forest management...

The Fireshed Registry is an interactive geospatial data portal providing access to data describing past, present, and future trends regarding wildfire exposure to communities and forest and fuel management. The registry employs a nested spatial framework that organizes landscape variation in wildfire risk to developed areas into containers or "firesheds" and displays these data on a background of maps on management and disturbances, including past and predicted wildfire events and their potential impacts. It was built in close cooperation with USDA Forest Service staff and establishes a...

The New Mexico Shared Stewardship Agreement created a framework to allow for the State of New Mexico and the USDA Forest Service to collaboratively identify mutual restoration goals to respond to the increasing suite of challenges facing the communities, landscapes, and natural and cultural resources of New Mexico. We used scenario planning to evaluate where forest management could achieve multiple shared restoration objectives, in particular, to reduce wildfire risk to water supply and quality; communities and infrastructure; and biodiversity. The results showed clusters of planning areas...

Climate change is expected to increase fire activity in many regions of the globe, but the relative role of human vs. lightning-caused ignitions on future fire regimes is unclear. We developed statistical models that account for the spatiotemporal ignition patterns by cause in the eastern slopes of the Cascades in Oregon, USA. Projected changes in energy release component from a suite of climate models were used with our model to quantify changes in frequency and extent of human and lightning-caused fires and record-breaking events based on sizes of individual fires between contemporary...

Increases in burned area and large fire occurrence are widely documented over the western United States over the past half century. Here, we focus on the elevational distribution of forest fires in mountainous ecoregions of the western United States and show the largest increase rates in burned area above 2,500 m during 1984 to 2017. Furthermore, we show that high-elevation fires advanced upslope with a median cumulative change of 252 m (-107 to 656 m; 95% CI) in 34 y across studied ecoregions. We also document a strong interannual relationship between high-elevation fires and warm season...

This report traces the flow of Wyoming’s 2018 timber harvest through the primary wood products industry and characterizes the structure, capacity, and condition of Wyoming’s forest products sector. Trends in timber harvest, production, sawmill capacity, mill residuals, and sales value are presented. Employment and worker earnings in the State’s primary and secondary forest products industries are also discussed. Periodic survey data collected from the forest products industry provides detailed information on Wyoming’s timber resources, wood utilization, and the economic contributions of...

Wildfires are known to be one of the main causes of soil erosion and land degradation, and their impacts on ecosystems and society are expected to increase in the future due to changes in climate and land use. It is therefore vital to mitigate the increased hydrological and erosive response after wildfires to maintain the sustainability of ecosystems and protect the values at risk downstream from the fire-affected areas. Soil erosion mitigation treatments have been widely applied after wildfires but assessment of their effectiveness has been limited to local and regional-scale studies,...