Treesearch

Throughout the Great Plains, aboveground annual net primary productivity (ANPP) is a critical ecosystem service supporting billions of dollars of commerce and countless stakeholders. Managers and producers struggle with high interannual change in ANPP, which often varies 40% between years due to fluctuating precipitation and drought. To quantify ANPP trends and evaluate interannual and spatial variation, we created the Rangeland Production Monitoring Service (RPMS), a spatially explicit database with automatic annual updates of ANPP for all rangelands in the conterminous United States. The...

Shared stewardship for the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS), or the creation of partnerships between the land management agencies and non-governmental entities, is integral to the completion of basic and fundamental stewardship tasks within Wilderness (e.g., trail work, Leave-No-Trace education, monitoring). However, successful shared stewardship for Wilderness is impeded by a variety of barriers, which are institutional (e.g., employee turnover), practical (e.g., lack of staff, limited informational resources about how to set up partnerships), and conceptual (e.g., ambiguity...

Between August 2019 and January 2020, social science research was completed in support of the comprehensive river management plan (CRMP) revision on the Flathead Wild and Scenic River system (Flathead WSR system). This report provides full analysis and results of this research, which includes multiple different perspectives about how people relate to the Flathead WSR system (i.e., ‘human-nature relationships’), those things (e.g., management actions, environmental change) that threaten or potentially benefit such human-nature relationships (i.e., ‘drivers of change’), and opinions about...

Trees in dry forests often regenerate in episodic pulses when wet periods coincide with ample seed production. Factors leading to success or failure of regeneration pulses are poorly understood. We investigated the impacts of stand thinning on survival and growth of the 2013 cohort of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Douglas ex P. Lawson & C. Lawson) seedlings in northern Arizona, United States.Wemeasured seedling survival and growth over the first five growing seasons after germination in six stand basal areas (BAs; 0, 7, 14, 23, 34, and 66 (unthinned)m2·ha-1) produced by long-term...

Recent mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae; MPB) outbreaks have caused one of the most widespread and dramatic changes in forest condition in North American forests in more than a century and highlighted challenges facing resource managers. To address uncertainty regarding the consequences of post-harvest woody residue management on soil productivity and tree regeneration following MPB outbreaks in lodgepole pine-dominated forests we compared three treatment prescriptions (bole-only harvest, whole-tree harvest, and whole-tree harvest with scarification) and uncut stands. The...

A higher frequency of increasingly severe droughts highlights the need for short-term measures to adapt existing forests to climate change. The maintenance of reduced stand densities has been proposed as a promising silvicultural tool for mitigating drought stress. However, the relationship between stand density and tree drought susceptibility remains poorly understood, especially across ecological gradients. Here, we analysed the effect of reduced stand density on tree growth and growth sensitivity, as well as on short-term drought responses (resistance, recovery, and resilience) of Scots...

Mastication is becoming a popular wildland fuel treatment in the United States but little is known about how masticated fuels dry over time, especially as these atypical fuelbeds age. This report summarises measured drying rates of different-aged masticated fuelbeds built from material collected from sites that were treated using one of four mastication techniques. We recreated three replicates of masticated fuelbeds in wire mesh cages using material collected from 13 sites sampled throughout the US Rocky Mountains. These caged fuelbeds were saturated and then their moisture contents were...

Wildland fire management agencies are responsible for assigning suppression resources to control fire spread and mitigate fire risks. This study implements a principle component analysis and an association rule analysis to study wildland fire response resource requests from 2016 to 2018 in the western US to identify daily resource ordering and assignment patterns for large fire incidents. Unsupervised learning can identify patterns in the assignment of individual resources or pairs of resources. Three national Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACCs) are studied, including California...

Tropical forests are of global importance even though they only cover around 10% of the Earth’s land surface. They store large amounts of carbon and host between one-half and two-thirds of the world’s species (Lewis 2006). Small changes in the tropical moist forest - the most biodiverse biome within the tropical forests - may lead to global impacts on climate dynamics and warming, water cycles, and the loss of biodiversity. If the current rates of deforestation and clearing patterns continue, many tropical moist forests could face an imminent regime shift towards an alternative tropical...

In sagebrush ecosystems, pinyon and juniper tree expansion reduces water available to perennial shrubs and herbs. We measured soil water matric potential and temperatures at 13-30 and 50-65 cm soil depths in untreated and treated plots across a range of environmental conditions. We sought to determine the effects of tree expansion, tree reduction treatments, and expansion phase at time of treatment over 12-13 yr post-treatment. Because the effects of tree reduction on vegetation can vary with the soil temperature/ moisture regime, we also analyzed differences in soil climate variables...