Treesearch

Background: The active use of wildfire to meet forest management objectives is an important tool to increase the scale of forest restoration in dry, historically frequent-fire forests. While there are many benefits of reintroducing fire to these forests, the impact of wildland fire use policies in frequent-fire forests on aboveground carbon stocks has not yet been studied. In this study, we begin to fill this knowledge gap by assessing how fire frequency and severity affected aboveground carbon dynamics in two basins in the Sierra Nevada with a history of wildfire use over the past 20 to...

Blanketflower (Gaillardia aristata Pursh) belongs to the Gaillardiinae subtribe and Helenieae tribe of the Asteraceae family (Strother 2006). This species was first collected on July 7, 1806, during the Lewis and Clark expedition. It was growing on a dry low-elevation hillside in the Rocky Mountains of Lewis and Clark County, Montana, where it was still common in vegetation surveys conducted in the late 1990s (Reveal et al. 1999).

Background. Researchers have developed technologies for fine-scale characterization of fuels via laser scanning and fine-scale measurement of surface fire behavior via terrestrial long-wave infrared (LWIR) imaging. Few studies have compared these technologies for their ability to estimate fuel consumption. Aims. Here we compare fuel consumption estimated from point cloud data with fuel consumption estimated from LWIR imagery collected during prescribed burns of pine woodlands in the southeastern United States. Methods. We adapted existing methods to estimate and map pre- and post-fire...

Biomass consumed in fires has direct ties to the carbon cycle and atmospheric emissions. Though pre- and postfire aboveground fuel biomass can be estimated using ground measurements, scaling of fuel load and consumption estimates requires remote sensing. Increased availability of pre- and post-fire airborne lidar scans is enabling the spatially explicit quantification of fuel load changes. The most commonly applied multitemporal lidar-based fuel consumption mapping method is modeled fuel load change (MFLC), an indirect approach that differences separately modeled pre- and post-fire fuel...

Biomass mapping is important for quantifying forest carbon stocks to provide precious insights for climate science and to inform natural resource management, such as fuel treatment planning. In this study, we demonstrated how to utilize Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) and Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) data along with other data sources to model and predict biomass for the forests in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California in 2016 and 2020. The model incorporated the Landsat time series data, GEDI height data, Landscape Fire and Resource Management...

Fuels are a large source of uncertainty in fire emissions estimates due to variability in the physical and chemical properties of fuels and how they are represented. These uncertainties can be addressed using imaging spectroscopy and lidar data, that provide observations of the chemical and physical traits and spatial distribution of vegetation. Combined with ground fuel measurements, these data provide information on fuel distribution and quantity important for mapping and modeling fire effects. In this study, we present a methodology to develop models and continuous maps of pre-fire fuel...

Background: Wildfires in western U.S. dry forest ecosystems have increased in size and severity during recent decades due primarily to more than a century of fire suppression, exclusion of Indigenous fire, and a rapidly warming climate. Fuel treatments have been employed to restore historical forest conditions and mitigate burn severity. However, their influence on burn severity in the context of other environmental variables and firefighting operations has not been extensively explored. The 2021 Bootleg Fire in south-central Oregon provided an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of...

The sagebrush biome in the western United States is a focus of widespread conservation concern due to multiple interacting threats including larger, more severe wildfires. Given the immense scale of the region and limited resources, prioritizing restoration treatments is essential for optimizing risk reduction and managing for resilient ecosystems. We leveraged work identifying sagebrush areas suitable for woody fuel treatments based on resilience to disturbance and resistance to annual grass invasion (R&R) and areas of sagebrush mapped as high conservation value. We used wildfire simulatio...

The rapid detection of exotic species is instrumental for their successful control and eradication. This is especially important in areas with limited resources available to mitigate any potentially detrimental impacts. Since Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands lack local arachnologists specialized in spiders, I explored citizen scientists’ photographic records to determine their usefulness in detecting spiders not recorded in scientific literature for the region. From citizens photographs I identified 13 spiders that have not been previously recorded in the region. I determine...

Ecological integrity - the degree to which an ecosystem supports ecological structure, composition, diversity, function, and connectivity typical of natural conditions - has been a guiding principle in ecosystem monitoring around the world. However, in terrestrial ecosystems, integrity-based monitoring often excludes animal communities, even though they are critical drivers of integrity. Methodological advances in monitoring and data science have made it easier to document animal communities. We highlight examples of these advances and how they remove barriers to adopting animal-specific...