Treesearch

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...

In a field that is hyper-focused on efficiency and cost savings, environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling - or detecting fish and wildlife from traces of genetic material in the environment - has become the gold standard. Over the last decade, eDNA sampling has emerged as a powerful and cost-effective tool for national forests to obtain the data they need to make management decisions. Now, Forest Service scientists have created “biochips” that generate these high-value data even more efficiently, buoying the value of eDNA monitoring capacity far into the future.

Effective wildlife conservation requires frequent and widespread data on species occurrence. With the maturation of eDNA-based monitoring - now widely recognized as sensitive, cost effective, and legally defensible - nationally coordinated eDNA strategies are beginning to take shape. Such ambitious initiatives will require eDNA analytics with the throughput and sensitivity required for surveillance of many protected, pathogenic, and invasive species across broad geographic scales. Here, we help meet this need with SmartScreen-AIS: a high-throughput qPCR (HT-qPCR) chip with 46 assays...

Background. Wildland firefighters are exposed to hazards when working which can, and do, result in serious injury or death. Understanding the activities in which firefighters are engaged when they are injured, the hazards to which they were exposed during that activity and the resulting injury severity is critical to manage the risk of serious injury to firefighters.Aims. This study aims to provide an assessment of wildland firefighter injuries.Methods. A set of 435 severe injuries in wildland firefighters in the United States from 2019 to 2023 was classified by activity being performed,...

Changing fire regimes have important implications for biodiversity and challenge traditional conservation approaches that rely on historical conditions as proxies for ecological integrity. This historical-centric approach becomes increasingly tenuous under climate change, necessitating direct tests of environmental impacts on biodiversity. At the same time, widespread departures from historical fire regimes have limited the ability to sample diverse fire histories. We examined 2 areas in California’s Sierra Nevada (USA) with active fire regimes to study the responses of bird, plant, and...

Everglades National Park (EVER) is located within fifty miles of Miami, Florida. Miami-Dade County is home to approximately 2.7 million people with 71.6 percent of the population identifying as Hispanic or Latino. Despite proximity to this diverse urban area, the demographics of EVER’s visitors largely do not represent the surrounding community. Conceptual frameworks of constraints can facilitate understanding of low park visitation among traditionally underserved communities; however, they have been criticized for being relatively superficial due to their predominantly quantitative...

Climate adaptation requires actionable scientific information about potential climate impacts. Spatial climate analogs answer the question, ‘where does the future climate of a focal location occur today?’ Analogs provide a means to develop measures of climate change exposure and can be applied to project climate change impacts. Although analogs are the basis for empirical models, recent applications of analogs have been structured as spatial models, which can contribute distinct information compared to more commonly used nonspatial approaches. Analogs may improve our ability to communicate...

Background: Despite progress in reducing industrial air pollution, rising wildfire frequency and intensity, driven in part by climate change, pose significant health risks. Accurate estimates of wildfire-generated fine particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter <2.5μm (PM2.5) are needed for advancing health research, policymaking, and environmental protection.Objective: This review evaluates existing methodologies and data sources for estimating wildfire-generated PM2.5, aiming to improving accuracy and accessibility for health research, policy development, and environmental management...

Understanding how species of conservation concern interact with natural disturbances provides insights into their evolutionary environment and can inform land management and conservation planning. We examined the breeding season nocturnal space use (i.e., foraging ecology) of three Mexican spotted owls (Strix occidentalis lucida) in southern New Mexico, USA that occurred in areas previously affected by timber harvest, wildfire, and insect-related tree mortality, respectively. We found that individual owls (1) preferentially used the ecotone between forests that were harvested and those...

The frequency and severity of drought events are predicted to increase due to anthropogenic climate change, with cascading effects across forested ecosystems. Management activities such as forest thinning and prescribed burning, which are often intended to mitigate fire hazard and restore ecosystem processes, may also help promote tree resistance to drought. However, it is unclear whether these treatments remain effective during the most severe drought conditions or whether their impacts differ across environmental gradients. We used tree-ring data from a system of replicated, long-term...