Treesearch

Riparian areas, wetlands, and groundwater-dependent ecosystems, which are found at all elevations throughout the Blue Mountains, comprise a small portion of the landscape but have high conservation value because they provide habitat for diverse flora and fauna. The effects of climate change on these special habitats may be especially profound, due to altered snowpack and hydrologic regimes predicted to occur in the near future. The functionality of many riparian areas is currently compromised by water diversions and livestock grazing, which reduces their resilience to additional stresses...

Aim: Abiotic conditions are key components that determine the distribution of species. However, co-occurring species can respond differently to the same factors, and determining which climate components are most predictive of geographic distributions is important for understanding community response to climate change. Here, we estimate and compare climate niches of ten subdominant, herbaceous forb species common in sagebrush steppe systems, asking how niches differ among co-occurring species and whether more closely related species exhibit higher niche overlap. Location: Western United...

This report describes modeling of historical range of variability and alternative management scenarios in the upper Yuba River watershed, Tahoe National Forest, California. We discuss the need for this study with respect to the historical and contemporary context of the northern Sierra Nevada landscape, including background on the range of variability concept and the use of simulation modeling to quantify it. We simulated the dynamics in vegetation driven by wildfire during the historical reference period (ca. 1550-1850). Based on the output, we quantified the range of variability in...

The U.S. Forest Service has a long, rich history of helping to steward the nation's fish and aquatic resources and contributing to the broader fish and aquatic conservation and scientific community in the United States and worldwide. The agency recently updated its national strategy for fish and aquatic resource stewardship. The new strategy builds on 30 years of lessons learned through implementing the agency's original Rise to the Future: National Fish and Aquatic Strategy, the first national freshwater fisheries strategy by a federal agency. It also addresses 21st century challenges,...

Terrestrial gastropods are part of one of the most vulnerable taxonomic groups, mollusks, but receive relatively little conservation attention. This is partially due to the paucity of peer-reviewed statistical evaluations of common survey techniques. From 2010 to 2014, we conducted a massive survey for terrestrial gastropods in a montane region centered on northern Idaho and including portions of northeastern Washington and northwestern Montana, USA. We fused several commonly used gastropod survey techniques (cover board traps baited with beer or water, pitfall traps, visual search, and...

Restoring overstocked forests by thinning and pyrolyzing residual biomass produces biochar and other value‐added products. Forest soils amended with biochar have potential to sequester carbon (C), improve soil quality, and alter greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without depleting nutrient stocks. Yet, few studies have examined the effects of biochar on GHG emissions and tree growth in temperate forest soils. We measured GHG emissions, soil C content, and tree growth at managed forest sites in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon. We applied biochar amendments of 0, 2.5, or 25 Mg/ha to the forest soil...

It seems as though dire predictions of U.S. forest decline continue to roll off the presses. Even the Nation’s forest census, the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program, has measured elevated levels of tree mortality in many forest types - mostly as a result of fires, drought, and insect outbreaks. However, in contrast to these indicators of decline, the FIA program also shows substantial regeneration and regrowth. In our recent paper (Klesse et al., 2018), we use a new network of tree-ring data collected in FIA plots to compare two predictions of forest decline,...

Climate-tree growth relationships recorded in annual growth rings have recently been the basis for projecting climate change impacts on forests. However, most trees and sample sites represented in the International Tree-Ring Data Bank (ITRDB) were chosen to maximize climate signal and are characterized by marginal growing conditions not representative of the larger forest ecosystem. We evaluate the magnitude of this potential bias using a spatially unbiased tree-ring network collected by the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program. We show that U.S. Southwest ITRDB samples...

This field guide is a tool for the identification of 119 common forbs found in the sagebrush rangelands and grasslands of the northern Great Basin. These forbs are important because they are either browsed directly by Greater Sage-grouse or support invertebrates that are also consumed by the birds. Species are arranged alphabetically by genus and species within families. Each species has a botanical description and one or more color photographs to assist the user. Most descriptions mention the importance of the plant and how it is used by Greater Sage-grouse. A glossary and indices with...

Aspen (Populus tremuloides) and lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) co-occur in the southern Rocky Mountains (USA), where mountain pine beetle (MPB, Dendroctonus ponderosae) has caused extensive lodgepole pine mortality since the late 1990s. Both species excel in post-disturbance high-light environments, but lodgepole pine has generally been thought to establish poorly on undisturbed seedbeds, and aspen suckering may be inhibited by intact aspen overstory. We ask whether lodgepole pine and aspen will regenerate in sufficient quantities to revegetate these forests. We visited a...