Treesearch

Occupancy-based monitoring has become an important tool in wildlife conservation and management. Nonetheless, meeting occupancy modeling assumptions and providing biologically accurate information are difficult tasks over long time periods, large areas, or whenmonitoringmultiple species. In occupancymodeling frameworks, derived grids are commonly used to divide landscapes intodiscrete units. Grid sizes thatmatch the home range size of the species of interest are considered optimal, but this practice is complicated as home range size may vary by sex, habitat quality, or among species....

Armillaria root and butt diseases, which are a global issue, can be influenced by changing environmental conditions. Armillaria gallica is a well-known pathogen of diverse trees worldwide (Brazee and Wick 2009). Besides A. gallica causing root rot of Hemerocallis sp. and Cornus sp. in South Carolina (Schnabel et al. 2005), little is reported on the distribution and host range of A. gallica in the southeastern United States. In July 2017, three Armillaria isolates were obtained from two naturally occurring hosts in Georgia, U.S.A., and cultured on malt extract medium (3% malt extract, 3%...

For over 100 years, the US Forest Service (USFS) has developed initiatives to improve safety outcomes. Herein we discuss the engineered solutions used from 1910 through 1994, when the agency relied on physical science to address the hazards of wildland fire suppression. We then interpret safety initiatives of the subsequent 25 years, as the USFS incorporated social science perspectives both into its understanding of emergency fire incidents and its mitigation of vulnerabilities across all fields of work. Tracing the safety programs using a historical sociology approach, we identify, within...

Changing wildfire regimes are causing rapid shifts in forests worldwide. In particular, forested landscapes that burn repeatedly in relatively quick succession may be at risk of conversion when pre-fire vegetation cannot recover between fires. Fire refugia (areas that burn less frequently or severely than the surrounding landscape) support post-fire ecosystem recovery and the persistence of vulnerable species in fire-prone landscapes. Observed and projected fire-induced forest losses highlight the need to understand where and why forests persist in refugia through multiple fires. This...

Conservation management is deploying increasingly intensive strategies to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem function in response to global anthropogenic threats. These strategies include intentionally introducing and eradicating species around the world via assisted migration, rewilding, biological control, invasive species eradications, and gene drives - management actions which have become highly contentious because of their potential for unintended consequences. We conducted a global literature review of these conservation actions to quantify how often unintended outcomes occur and to...

We previously demonstrated that small mammals impact plant recruitment globally via size-dependent seed predation, generating a unimodal pattern across ecosystems. Chen et al. (2021) critiqued our seed removal analysis, advocating corrections for exposure time. We show such manipulations are unwarranted and argue for increased emphasis on plant recruitment metrics.

Northern Eurasia is currently highly sensitive to climate change. Fires in this region can have significant impacts on regional air quality, radiative forcing and black carbon deposition in the Arctic which can accelerate ice melting. Using a MODIS-derived burned area dataset, we report that the total annual area burned in this region declined by 53% during the 15-year period from 2002 to 2016. Grassland fires dominated this trend, accounting for 93% of the decline in the total area burned. Grassland fires in Kazakhstan contributed 47% of the total area burned and 84% of the decline. A...

A shared understanding of the benefits and tradeoffs to people from alternative land management strategies is critical to successful decision-making for managing public lands and fostering shared stewardship. This study describes an approach for identifying and monitoring the types of resource benefits and tradeoffs considered in National Forest planning in the United States under the 2012 Planning Rule and demonstrates the use of tools for conceptualizing the production of ecosystem services and benefits from alternative land management strategies. Efforts to apply these tools through...

This report traces the flow of timber harvested in the “Four Corners” States (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah) during calendar year 2016, describes the composition and operations of the region’s primary forest products industry, and quantifies volumes and uses of wood fiber. Recent wood products industry changes are discussed, as well as trends in timber harvest, production, and sales of primary wood products.

This issue highlights RMRS research spanning topics including using environmental DNA in fish eradication efforts, how bark beetle outbreaks affect weeds, long-term weed dynamics after forest restoration, the Fire Effects Information System’s invasive plant species database, uncovering the importance of seed-eating small mammals on plant communities and invasions, and others. We are also excited to report publication of a national assessment of the state of science on invasive species.