Treesearch

A study of commercial timber-harvesting sites in Arizona and New Mexico was conducted from 2012 to 2017 to estimate growing-stock removals, characterize current tree utilization and logging operations, and assist with estimating the amount of woody biomass left on-site after harvesting. Fifty-four sample logging sites were selected within major geographic regions proportional to regional five-year timber harvests. A two-stage sampling method was used to compute State-level utilization factors from 1,358 felled trees. Results indicated that in Arizona, for every 1,000 cubic feet (CF)...

The Latinx population is the largest growing minority population in the United States and is estimated to comprise 28% of the U.S. population by 2050. This continued growth is no longer due to foreign-born immigration, which accounted for 34% of all Latinx people in 2015, but rather to those born in the U.S., who comprised 66% of all Latinxs that year. Therefore, the current and future Latinx population consists of second-, third-, and fourth-generation Americans who report being fluent in English and Spanish, have higher levels of education, and earn higher incomes. As the Latinx populatio...

Top-down technical or engineered solutions to deal with flood control such as channelization are increasingly unaffordable. We explored how community leaders’ frame the concept of risk, particularly due to flooding, and documented bottom-up rather than top-down solutions within the context of Hurricane Maria and the current financial crisis. This research aimed to interview environmental conservation organizational leaders to assess the broader question of what makes San Juan livable, and the role that flooding risk management plays in defining livability. Their perception of bottom-up...

This assessment was conducted to provide information on the current conditions of riparian and groundwater-dependent ecosystems in relation to their natural range of variation on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. We summarized dominant riparian community types that are present on the Forest and described riparian fish and wildlife habitat. We used peer-reviewed literature, data from the Forest and other partners, and site visits to evaluate the status of five key ecosystem characteristics: (1) surface water and groundwater fluctuations, (2) water quality, (3) channel and floodplain...

Between 2016 and 2018, the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute hosted a team of scholars to reflect on how Federal agencies can best prescribe restoration for conditions associated with climate change-induced disturbance to protect sustainability in mixed-ownership lands, with a focus on the Upper Missouri River Basin. Phase 1 of this project was a review of natural resources and current threats to these resources on mixed-ownership lands adjacent to the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana and Wyoming, USA. Phase 2 was aimed at...

Prescribed fire escapes continue to challenge most fire and land management agencies and many communities. This article considers the issue from knowledge management (KM) and organizational learning (OL) perspectives. We review organizational initiatives and the literature that have developed over the last 10 years to support learning from escaped prescribed fires, then use this to evaluate current learning practices and identify potential next frontiers for improving performance. Due to the difficulty obtaining statistics for non-federal entities, this review focuses primarily on developme...

Changes in individual climate variables have been widely documented over the past century. However, assessments that consider changes in the collective interaction amongst multiple climate variables are relevant for understanding climate impacts on ecological and human systems yet are less well documented than univariate changes. We calculate annual multivariate climate departures during 1958-2017 relative to a baseline 1958-1987 period that account for covariance among four variables important to Earth’s biota and associated systems: annual climatic water deficit, annual evapotranspiration...

Climate connectivity, the ability of a landscape to promote or hinder the movement of organisms in response to a changing climate, is contingent on multiple factors including the distance organisms need to move to track suitable climate over time (i.e. climate velocity) and the resistance they experience along such routes. An additional consideration which has received less attention is that human land uses increase resistance to movement or alter movement routes and thus influence climate connectivity. Here we evaluate the influence of human land uses on climate connectivity across North...

In this issue, we include topics from the importance of biocrusts on invasive versus native plant establishment, effects of dryland restoration on invasive plants, using native seed mixes (rather than nonnative grass mixes) to inhibit cheatgrass invasion after fire, and exploring volatiles of high-elevation pines to better understand resistance to insects and pathogens. As always, we welcome feedback on ways to improve the ISWG and this newsletter.

The balance of production activities at the landing is pivotal to the success of any forest harvesting operation and has a direct impact on the cost and effciency of the enterprise. The primary objective of this study was to understand the operational characteristics of the loader in a hot operation (handling both sawlog and biomass components concurrently) and cold operation (handling biomass and sawlogs separately) for harvesting sawlogs and biomass. Systematic work sampling techniques were employed to obtain “snapshots” of the loader activities for a cable logging operation, including...