Treesearch

Spatially explicit information about stand-level Time Since the last stand-replacing Disturbance (TSD) is fundamental for modelling many forest ecosystem processes, but most of the current satellite remote sensing mapping approaches are based on change detection and time series analysis, and can detect only disturbances that have occurred since the start of the optical satellite data record. The spatial legacy of stand-replacing disturbances can however persist on the landscape for several decades to centuries, in the form of distinct horizontal and vertical stand structure features. We...

Predicting post-fire tree mortality is a major area of research in fire-prone forests, woodlands, and savannas worldwide. Past research has relied overwhelmingly on logistic regression analysis (LR) that predicts post-fire tree status as a binary outcome (i.e. living or dead). One of the most problematic issues for LR (or any classification problem) occurs when there is a class imbalance in the training data. In these instances, predictions will be biased toward the majority class. Using a historical prescribed fire data set of longleaf pines (Pinus palustris) from northern Florida, USA,...

Deforestation is rapidly altering Southeast Asian landscapes, resulting in some of the highest rates of habitat loss worldwide. Among the many species facing declines in this region, clouded leopards rank notably for their ambassadorial potential and capacity to act as powerful levers for broader forest conservation programmes. Thus, identifying core habitat and conservation opportunities are critical for curbing further Neofelis declines and extending umbrella protection for diverse forest biota similarly threatened by widespread habitat loss. Furthermore, a recent comprehensive habitat...

Purpose of Review: The objectives of this paper are to briefly review basic risk-management and analytics concepts, describe their nexus in relation to wildfire response, demonstrate real-world application of analytics to support response decisions and organizational learning, and outline an analytics strategy for the future. -- Recent Findings: Analytics can improve decision-making and organizational performance across a variety of areas from sports to business to real-time emergency response. A lack of robust descriptive analytics on wildfire incident response effectiveness is a bottlenec...

Fuel treatments are used in overstocked, fire-prone forests to alter wildfire behavior and reduce fire risk. Some of the benefits they provide are not captured in markets, and therefore represent unaccounted environmental externalities that can lead to inefficient decision making. This study uses a replicable method to integrate market and nonmarket economic values into a comprehensive economic evaluation of fuel treatment and bioenergy production using a case study of ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests in Colorado's wildland-urban interface. Treatment costs and people's willingness...

The western pine beetle (WPB), Dendroctonus brevicomis LeConte, is a major mortality agent of pines in North America. A total of 706 adults of WPB from 81 geographical sites were analyzed with traditional and geometric morphometric methods to evaluate the variation of discrete and quantitative morphological characters with particular attention to the antenna, spermatheca, and seminal rod. Principal coordinates and canonical variate analyses supported three geographical groups in WPB: (1)West, from British Columbia to southern California along the Pacific coast, Idaho, and Montana; (2)...

This short paper provides the framework and introduction to this special issue of International Journal of Wildland Fire. Its eight papers were selected from those presented at two consecutive conferences held in 2018 in Europe and the USA that focussed on the impacts of wildfire on factors that regulate streamflow, water quality, sediment transport, and aquatic habitats. Despite decades of watershed research, our understanding of the effects of wildfires on the processes that regulate clean water supply remains limited. Here, we summarise the key challenges and research needs in this...

An open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver has been incorporated into the WindNinja modeling framework. WindNinja is widely used by wildland fire managers, as well as researchers and practitioners in other fields, such as wind energy, wind erosion, and search and rescue. Here, we describe the CFD solver and evaluate its performance against the WindNinja conservation of mass (COM) solver, and previously published large-eddy simulations (LES), for three field campaigns with varying terrain complexity: Askervein Hill, Bolund Hill, and Big Southern Butte. We also compare the...

While the importance of floral odours for pollinator attraction relative to visual cues is increasingly appreciated, how they structure community‐level plant–pollinator interactions is poorly understood. Elucidating the functional roles of flowering plant species with respect to their floral volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and how those roles vary over the growing season is an initial step towards understanding the contribution of floral VOCs to plant-pollinator interaction structure.

Assessing forest degradation has been a challenging task due to the generally slow-changing nature of the process, which demands long periods of observation and high frequency of records. This research contributes to efforts aimed at detecting forest degradation by analyzing the trend component of the time series of Leaf Area Index (LAI) collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) over Central Mexico from 2002 to 2017. The analysis of the trend component is proposed to overcome the challenge of identifying very subtle and gradual changes that can be undetected if...