Treesearch

Wildfire-generated snags provide key habitat for wildlife associated with recently disturbed forests, offering nesting and foraging resources for several woodpecker species. Snag harvest through post-fire salvage logging provides economic value but reduces habitat in recently burned forests. Managers of recently burned forests often must identify suitable woodpecker habitat within timeframes precluding field surveys. We developed nesting habitat suitability models for the Lewis’s woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis) - a species of conservation concern potentially impacted by salvage logging - to...

Soil sustainability is key to maintaining forest growth and ecosystem services around the world. Determining how to maintain soil functions and knowing when soils are degraded can be difficult. Complicating our understanding of the relationship between soil functions and soil sustainability is the inherent heterogeneity of forest soils. However, maintaining or improving soil organic matter (OM) contents is essential to soil health, quality, and sustainability, and both OM quantity and quality have key roles in soil porosity, water infiltration, gas exchange, nutrient cycling, aggregate...

Our findings provide insight into the role of the landscape in shaping population genetic structure in a widespread tree species as well as the potential response of local populations to novel conditions, knowledge critical to understanding how widely distributed species may respond to climate change. Geographically based genetic structure and reduced survival under water-limited conditions may make some populations of widespread tree species more vulnerable to local maladaptation and extirpation. However, genetically diverse and phenotypically plastic populations of widespread trees, such...

Cofre de Perote National Park (CPNP) in Veracruz, Mexico is part of the Transmexican Volcanic Belt, and its Pinus hartwegii forests reflect a balance between the various natural factors that represent the region’s climatology and hydrology. Like many other areas in this region, the historical fire regimes of these forests and their relationship with climate are unknown, but are needed for sustainable management plans. The main objectives of this study were to reconstruct the historical fire regime in a Pinus hartwegii forest and decipher the influenced of climate. Our investigation focused...

Wildfire affects many types of communities. Improved understandings of urban conflagrations are leading some fire-prone communities, such as Ashland, Oregon, to expand their attention from focusing solely on the intermix fringe to managing wildfire threats across more urbanized wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities. The core intent of this project was to build a partnership between the Wildfire Research (WiRē) Team and Ashland Fire and Rescue (AFR) by leveraging existing wildfire risk data collected in March 2018 and pairing it with newly collected social data to better understand...

Restoration of fire-prone forests is a common practice intended to increase resilience to wildfire, drought, and bark beetles. However, the long-term effects of restoration treatments on understory species, particularly nonnative species, are poorly understood. We investigated long-term (23 years) effects of restoration treatments on native and non-native understory vegetation at the Lick Creek Demonstration-Research Forest, a ponderosa pine/Douglas-fir forest in western Montana, USA. Restoration treatments included shelterwood-with-reserves harvesting implemented alone or in combination...

The Great Plains of North America encompass approximately 1,300,000 km2 of land from Texas to Saskatchewan. The integrity of these lands is under continual assault by long-established and newly- arrived invasive plant species, which can threaten native species and diminish land values and ecological goods and services by degrading desired grassland resources. The Great Plains are a mixture of privately and publicly owned lands, which leads to a patchwork of varying management goals and strategies for controlling invasive plants. Continually updated knowledge is required for efficient and...

In recent years, the pocket penetrometer (PPT) test has been used to measure soil compaction and has gained attention due to its simplicity, high speed, and low cost. This study aimed to predict soil strength using a regression relationship between unconfined compressive strength (UCS) and PPT. We collected 45 large soil samples from a forest district in a part of the Hyrcanian Forest. In the laboratory, soil samples were classified according to unified soil classification system. Samples were classified as either silt or clay with a low or high liquid limit. These four soil groups were,...

Tree mortality associated with drought and concurrent bark beetle outbreaks is expected to increase with further climate change.When these two types of disturbance occur in concert it complicates our ability to accurately predict future forest mortality. The recent extreme California USA drought and bark beetle outbreaks resulted in extensive tree mortality and provides a unique opportunity to examine questions of why some trees die while others survive these co-occurring disturbances. We use plot-level data combined with a three-proxy tree-level approach using radial growth, carbon...

Energy is an integral part of society. The major US energy sources of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas); biofuels (ethanol); and wind are concentrated in grassland ecosystems of the Great Plains. As energy demand continues to increase, mounting pressures will be placed on North American grassland systems. In this review, we present the ecological effects of energy development and production on grassland systems. We then identify opportunities to mitigate these effects during the planning, construction, and production phases by using informed methodology and improved technology. Primary...