Treesearch

Wildland fuels, defined as the combustible biomass of live and dead vegetation, are foundational to fire behavior, ecological effects, and smoke modeling. Along with weather and topography, the composition, structure and condition of wildland fuels drive fire spread, consumption, heat release, plume production and smoke dispersion. To refine inputs to existing and next-generation smoke modeling tools, improved characterization of the spatial and temporal dynamics of wildland fuels is necessary. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models that resolve fire–atmosphere interactions offer a...

The 2012 USDA Forest Service Planning rule requires that National Forests incorporate mitigation and adaptation strategies in response to climate change into their forest management plans. An underlying foundation of this work is knowing the distribution of aboveground biomass across the landscape. Climate change may put some areas with high biomass at greater risk for carbon emissions from wildfires, whereas other areas with reduced risk of wildfire may be preferred locations to manage for increased carbon storage.

To improve access and understanding of postfire resources, scientists with the Rocky Mountain Research Station and its partners have drawn on years of science/management collaboration to compile an online resource called the After Fire Toolkit and Information site. The After Fire Toolkit, which can be found at www.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/ tools/after-fire-toolkit-southwest, came about following a 2014 science and land management workshop to identify and prioritize land managers’ research needs for enhancing longterm resilience of ecological systems to wildfire. The Toolkit includes technical...

Reliable predictions of emissions from wildland fires are a key element of smoke management programs. Emission factors (the amount of pollutants produced per amount of fuel consumed) are used in models to estimate the composition of smoke. Over the past two decades, laboratory and field studies have made great progress in characterizing the chemical composition of smoke and quantifying emission factors. However, until recently, the widely used First Order Fire Effects Model (FOFEM) did not incorporate these advances in smoke science. A recent Rocky Mountain Research Station project...

Mastication reduces forest vegetation into small chunks by grinding, shredding, or chopping material with specialized equipment. The type of equipment varies from using a front-end to a boom-mounted rotary blade to a drum-type head. Forest managers use mastication to remove competition, prepare a site for regeneration, release sapling-sized trees, and convert ladder fuels to surface fuels. This Science You Can Use article describes the potential benefits of mastication as a forest management tool, presented in the form of a set of decision trees that can guide land managers in choosing the...

Wildfires in the western United States are expected to increase both in size and severity in coming decades. These trends are likely to accelerate large-scale habitat loss and fragmentation for the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest, California, and the Southwest. All three subspecies that occupy these regions have declined over the last century, and the Mexican and northern subspecies are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in the United States. Predicted changes in the extent and severity of wildfire are driven by a combination of climate change and cumulative effects...

How do land management decisions shape landscapes decades into the future? With the influence of climate change and its associated stressors, it’s an increasingly thorny question. According to Paulette Ford, a research ecologist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, “Land managers were coming to me and saying, ‘The rain’s coming too late in the season,’ or ‘We’ve got these weird fire cycles.’ What they’re talking about is unprecedented events and climate variability.”

With increasing loss and fragmentation of habitats driving the emerging global extinction crisis, paired with limited resources for conservation, there is an immense need to identify and prioritize the most important areas for conservation actions. The goal of this study was to measure, map and rank core areas and corridors for mainland clouded leopard (a forest indicator species) across its entire range in Southeast Asia. We used an empirically based landscape resistance model developed from range‐wide camera survey data, cumulative resistant kernel analysis to define core areas and...

After decades of political and economic isolation, Myanmar is now the focus of large international investments, particularly from China, which raises questions of how to balance national development with safeguarding the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot.

Understanding the genetic basis underlying the local adaptation of nonmodel species is a fundamental goal in evolutionary biology. In this study, we explored the genetic mechanisms of the local adaptation of Forsythia suspensa using genome sequence and population genomics data obtained from specific-locus amplified fragment sequencing. We assembled a high-quality reference genome of weeping forsythia (Scaffold N50 = 7.3 Mb) using ultralong Nanopore reads. Then, genome-wide comparative analysis was performed for 15 natural populations of weeping forsythia across its current distribution...