Treesearch

Forest insects and pathogens, in addition to fire, contribute to structural diversity by creating snags (dead trees) and dead tops on live trees or “topkill” in conifers throughout western North America. Snags and top-killed trees are important sources of wildlife habitat but quantifying their presence can be challenging at broad scales. Multiple approaches for detecting snags have been developed, but limited methods exist for detecting topkill via remote sensing. There is a need to monitor overlapping disturbances across time and space in addition to the structural diversity in mature and...

Climate change is expected to alter fire return intervals in cold and wet forests in the northwestern United States. This coupled with an expected rise in prescribed fires to restore healthy forests, disproportionately increases risk to saplings of tree species adapted to colder and wetter environments that have low fire resistance. To assess this potential impact, we evaluated the impacts of increasing fire intensity on Picea engelmannii and Thuja plicata sapling physiology, morphology, and mortality. This was achieved using established pyro-ecophysiology experiments where saplings were...

The Raster Tools Python package provides an application programmers interface (API) for building raster data processing pipelines. Pipelines built with Raster Tools can efficiently process extremely large raster datasets, including those larger than the system’s available memory. Raster Tools can be deployed on systems ranging from small laptops to high performance computing environments. To aid in the construction of raster processing pipelines, Raster Tools provides a consistent API to a suite of scalable and lazy raster processing functions including focal, zonal, clipping, convolution,...

Today, we hear a great deal about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it is changing society. Every time we search for something on our computers, buy something over the internet, take a picture on our phone, ask Google where to eat, get mapping directions, or search for a phone number, we are knowingly, and often unknowingly, using AI. But what exactly is AI and how is it being used within forestry?

Reducing fuels in overly dense, arid forests of the Western US is a prominent fire mitigation strategy. Fuel treatments, including thinning and prescribed burning, are a means of reintroducing fire to fire-dependent forests and alleviating wildfire-related damages to human health, infrastructure and natural resources.To help establish economic efficiency analysis of fuel treatments, we provide a methodological framework illustrating benefit-cost analysis (BCA) and considerations for dealing with valuation complexity.Our framework was developed from research reviews and valuation discussions...

Wildfire risk mitigation on private property is central to reducing community wildfire vulnerability. Homeowners have control over many of the key factors that contribute to wildfire risk on their parcels, yet vulnerable conditions persist. One potential explanation is a misalignment between homeowners’ and trained assessors’ perceptions of parcel-level wildfire risk. Prior research has documented a “risk gap” in a single community wherein owners often underestimate their parcel-level wildfire risk; however, it is unclear whether such misalignments are widespread. This study replicates and...

Federally designated wilderness in the US is to be stewarded to provide, among other qualities, outstanding opportunities for unconfined recreation - or recreation generally free from rules and regulations. However, compared to other wilderness character qualities, measurement and monitoring of unconfined recreation is often considered less formally. This research seeks to understand the spatial distribution of unconfined recreation across wilderness areas and other federal and nonfederal protected areas in Colorado, and to answer questions related to comparative levels of confinement...

Trust is essential for successful environmental governance, but more research is needed to understand how trust ecology dynamics interact to influence partnership success. We applied the trust ecology framework to partnerships between federal agencies and non-governmental organizations focused on outdoor recreation management. Data were collected from U.S. agency personnel and nonprofit organizations engaged in partnerships to understand partnership success, overall trust, and the four trust pathways: expected behavior (rational trust), emotional connection/shared values (affinitive...

The 2017 fire season in Montana was especially severe, with more than 2,400 wildfires burning about 1.4 million acres across the state. In the aftermath, the Forest Service’s Northern Region headquarters helped assess and prioritize national forest recovery needs. The work required hundreds of hours compiling data, matching it with GIS layers and fire boundaries, and considering factors such as slope, aspect, and the presence of nearby tree species.

Diseases are threatening forests worldwide. In North America, white pine blister rust (WPBR) is one of the most damaging tree epidemics. To understand patterns in the current and future risk for high-elevation five-needle white pine species (High-5), we compiled data from independent studies across the western U.S. to estimate WPBR risk. Contrary to previous predictions, the future climate is not expected to reduce the prevalence of WPBR risk on High-5 species in the western U.S. The prevalence of WPBR is predicted to increase, with most distributions of the High-5 species projected to...