Treesearch

Utah sweetvetch has a broad distribution from ranging from Alaska, across most of Canada, and south through the western United States to Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. It is particularly common in the Rocky Mountains and other mountainous regions of the western United States (Hitchcock and Cronquist 2018; Ross 2020). Subspecies mackenzii occupies only the northern range of the species, occurring from Alaska across Canada and south to Washington and Oregon (Hitchcock and Cronquist 2018). Subspecies boreale occurs from British Columbia to Manitoba and south, mainly in the Rocky...

The Enchantments area within the Alpine Lakes Wilderness has long been a popular recreation area, which has led the Forest Service to adopt an overnight permit system and, more recently, to consider a day-use permit system to balance recreation, resource protection, and visitor safety. The Enchantments area includes high-use trails such as those off of Icicle Rd, including Stuart Lake, Eightmile, and Snow Lakes. Current challenges facing managers include ensuring visitor safety, and mitigating crowding and impacts to nature. Current management strategies involve education, infrastructure...

Rising visitation to the Cleveland National Forest (CNF) has led the Forest Service to adopt the 2022 San Diego River Watershed Visitor Use Management Plan to balance recreation, resource protection, and visitor safety. High-use sites such as Three Sisters Falls and Cedar Creek Falls are priorities due to their urban proximity, wildfire potential, limited parking, quantity of Search and Rescue efforts, and status as two of the only accessible waterfalls in the county. Challenges include safety, crowding, and ecological impacts. Current strategies involve education, infrastructure, permits,...

Drought often occurs when precipitation is lower than average growing season precipitation. Drought can vary spatially and temporally across the Northern Great Plains and lead to localized as well as widespread reductions in forage production. In South Dakota, because of its extensive grasslands, managers and producers rely on drought prediction tools that can forecast drought and be frequently updated as the growing season progresses. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed the South Dakota Drought Tool (SDDT) to provide peak and monthly forage production estimates for...

The work environment for a wildland firefighter on an incident is both physically and mentally demanding, and for some requires a high level of caloric intake from quality food sources provided by meal catering services. The aim of this study is to explore wildland firefighter perceptions of meal catering during wildfire incidents. We conducted seven, in-depth one-hour interviews with wildland firefighters with over four decades of wildland fire experience, during the months of May through June 2024. Exploratory qualitative findings from seven interviews revealed the following themes:...

Outdoor recreational wood burning, such as fire pit use, can produce large amounts of smoke which contains fine particulate matter (PM) and other air pollutants. Recently, purported “smokeless”, or low-smoke, fire pits have become widely available. Motivated by the apparent public desire for low-smoke options and the prospect of reducing PM pollution, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, collaborated with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to measure air pollutant emissions from low-smoke fire pits. We measured emission factors (EF) for PM (EFPM), carbon monoxide,...

During 2022–2024, the Wildfire Research (WiRē) Center partnered with the West Region Wildfire Council (WRWC) to learn more about parcel-level wildfire risk in Montrose County, Colorado. This research project was part of a larger, sustained collaboration between WiRē and WRWC, moving the focus from areas typically characterized as fire-prone due to heavily treed and steep topography, into an area with relatively gentle topography and lighter fuels. The study area borders and includes northern portions of Ouray County that fall within the service area of Montrose County Fire Protection...

The Fire Effects Information System is a publicly available, searchable website with over 1,400 comprehensive literature syntheses on fire-related topics. It is maintained by a team of ecologists, writers, and editors who pore through and synthesize thousands of publications on the biology, ecology, and fire ecology of species and ecosystems to produce evidence-based literature reviews that land managers can rely on for decision support. The team continuously writes and updates these reviews, making FEIS a dynamic resource.

Increasing participation in outdoor recreation is driving elevated levels of human presence in wildlands. If properly managed, outdoor recreation can benefit conservation goals while providing the public with numerous benefits. However, balancing increased demand for recreation opportunities and maintaining ecological integrity can pose difficult tradeoffs for managers. As such, there is a need for additional data-driven resources to help inform land management decisions. Traditional approaches of measuring recreational use, such as trail counters, are costly, labor intensive, and lack the...

Earth Observation (EO) data can provide added value to nations’ assessments of vegetation aboveground biomass density (AGBD) with minimal additional costs. Yet, neither open access to global-scale EO datasets of vegetation heights or biomass, nor the availability of computational power, has proven sufficient for their wide uptake in climate policy-related assessments. Using Mexico as an example, one of the primary obstacles to enhancing their National Forest Inventory (NFI) with such global EO datasets is the lack of statistically defensible methodologies that do so, while addressing the...