Treesearch

The 2020 RPA Assessment includes climate change as a driver affecting natural resources on forests and rangelands in the United States. This publication describes the process used to select the scenarios, climate models, and climate projections that will be used to project renewable resource conditions 50 years into the future. Downscaled climate data selected are the MACAv2-METDATA developed by Abatzoglou and others at the University of Idaho. The dataset covers the conterminous United States at a grid size of approximately 4 km (1/24 degree) on a side. The two selected scenarios are the...

Methods to accurately estimate spatially explicit fuel consumption are needed because consumption relates directly to fire behavior, effects, and smoke emissions. Our objective was to quantify sparkleberry (Vaccinium arboretum Marshall) shrub fuels before and after six experimental prescribed fires at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. We used a novel approach to characterize shrubs non-destructively from three-dimensional (3D) point cloud data collected with a terrestrial laser scanner. The point cloud data were reduced to 0.001 m-3 voxels that were either occupied to indicate fuel presence...

Boreal forests are globally extensive and store large amounts of carbon, but recent climate change has led to drier conditions and increasing fire activity. The objective of this study is to quantify trends in fire size and frequency using data spanning multiple scales in space and time. We use multi-temporal Landsat image compositing on Google Earth Engine and validate results with reference fire maps from the Canadian Park Service. We also interpret general fire trends through the concept of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC). Our study site is Wood Buffalo National Park, which is a fire...

Accurately quantifying forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is one of the most significant challenges in remote sensing, and is critical for understanding global carbon sequestration. Here, we evaluate the effectiveness of airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) for monitoring AGB stocks and change (ΔAGB) in a selectively logged tropical forest in eastern Amazonia. Specifically, we compare results from a suite of different modelling methods with extensive field data. The calibration AGB values were derived from 85 50 × 50m field plots established in 2014 and which were estimated using...

Bark beetles cause significant tree mortality in western North America. The United States Forest Service coordinates annual insect and disease surveys (IDS) by observers in airplanes to map and quantify the tree mortality caused by beetles. The subjective nature of these surveys means that accuracy evaluation is important for characterizing uncertainty. Furthermore, the metric reported for quantifying tree mortality recently changed (2012-2018 depending in region) from killed trees per acre to percent tree mortality within damage polygons, posing challenges for linking older and newer...

Forests are an important component of the global carbon balance, and climate sensitive growth and yield models are an essential tool when predicting future forest conditions. In this study, we used the dynamic climate capability of the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) to simulate future (100 year) forest conditions on four National Forests in the northwestern USA: Payette National Forest (NF), Ochoco NF, Gifford Pinchot NF, and Siuslaw NF. Using Forest Inventory and Analysis field plots, aboveground carbon estimates and species compositions were simulated with Climate-FVS for the period...

Since the mid-1800s pinyon-juniper (PJ) woodlands have been encroaching into sagebrush-steppe shrublands and grasslands such that they now comprise 40% of the total forest and woodland area of the Intermountain West of the United States. More recently, PJ ecosystems in select areas have experienced dramatic reductions in area and biomass due to extreme drought, wildfire, and management. Due to the vast area of PJ ecosystems, tracking these changes in woodland tree cover is essential for understanding their consequences for carbon accounting efforts, as well as ecosystem structure and...

When analyzing environmental samples for DNA from multiple taxa, researchers must usually decide between iterative analyses with single-taxon assays - which are reliable and sensitive, but also laborious to apply - and approaches such as metabarcoding that can simultaneously target multiple species, but which are less sensitive for detection across taxa. Here, we test an intermediate approach that allows efficient, parallel assessment of taxon-specific qPCR assays via high-throughput quantitative PCR (HT-qPCR). Based on an assessment of over 500 environmental samples, we found that...

In 2015, researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Human Dimensions Program (hereafter U.S. Forest Service), and the University of Có\ordoba, Forest Engineering Department, Forest Fire Laboratory, Spain (hereafter University of Cordoba), entered into an official Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The primary objective of the MOU is to jointly develop strategic fire planning models and decision support systems to promote cost-effective and efficient fuels and fire management. The broader goals of the research are to enhance firefight...

Improving decision processes and the informational basis upon which decisions are made in pursuit of safer and more effective fire response have become key priorities of the fire research community. One area of emphasis is bridging the gap between fire researchers and managers through development of application-focused, operationally relevant decision support tools. In this paper we focus on a family of such tools designed to characterise the difficulty of suppression operations by weighing suppression challenges against suppression opportunities. These tools integrate potential fire...