Treesearch

Drawing on national forest visitor use data from 722 overnight use recreation sites across 27 National Forests with oil and gas development, this work examines whether the presence of oil and gas development within five kilometers of an overnight recreation site affects site visitation. Findings suggest that sites within five kilometers of oil and gas wells see less visitation, compared to sites farther away from wells. While this work does not attempt to speculate on the overall user experience, it does suggest that the presence of oil and gas development may have a significant enough...

NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamic Investigation (GEDI) mission has been designed to measure forest structure using lidar waveforms to sample the earth’s vegetation while in orbit aboard the International Space Station. In this paper, we used airborne large-footprint (LF) lidar measurements to simulate GEDI observations from which we retrieved ground elevation, vegetation height, and aboveground biomass (AGB). GEDI-like product accuracy was then assessed by comparing them to similar products derived from airborne small-footprint (SF) lidar measurements. The study focused on tropical forests...

The United States Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program has been monitoring national forest resources in the United States for over 80 years; presented here is a synthesis of research applications for FIA data. A review of over 180 publications that directly utilize FIA data is broken down into broad categories of application and further organized by methodologies and niche research areas. The FIA program provides the most comprehensive forest database currently available, with permanent plots distributed across all forested lands and ownerships in the United States and plot histories...

The Little Missouri National Grassland is the largest designated National Grassland in the United States and represents one of the best examples of intact native mixed-grass prairie in the United States. The Little Missouri National Grasslands occurs entirely within the Williston Basin, which has been a leading source of conventional oil and gas production since the 1950s. Recent advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (since 2000) have greatly increased energy extraction activities on the Little Missouri National Grassland. The objective of this assessment is to synthesize...

Forest managers use mastication to grind or shed vegetation to remove competition, prepare a site for natural or artificial regeneration, or release sapling-sized trees; or they use mastication to convert ladder fuels to surface fuels and enhance decomposition of biomass. However, determining the best mastication configuration within the context of management objectives and site limitations is challenging. This report synthesizes our current knowledge on mastication as a forest management tool. We found that excavators, skid steers, and tractors can all be carrier machines and different...

We present a reconceptualization of forests in eastern North America by differentiating the ecological characteristics of open oak (Quercus) and pine (Pinus) forests from closed successional and oldgrowth forests. Despite historical abundance of savannas and woodlands, the fundamental ecology of open forest ecosystems remains ill-defined when compared to either closed forests or grasslands. Open forests were characterized by simple internal stand structure consisting of a single stratum of variably spaced, often very old overstory trees and limited midstory, maintained by understory...

This report summarizes the most recent inventory of Wyoming’s forests based on field data collected between 2011 and 2015. The report includes descriptive highlights and tables of area, numbers of trees, biomass, carbon, volume, growth, mortality, and removals. Most sections and tables are organized by forest type or forest-type group, species group, diameter class, or owner group. The report also describes the inventory design, inventory terminology, and data reliability. Results show that Wyoming’s forest land covers 10.5 million acres. Fifty-five percent (5.8 million acres) of this...

Climate change is already resulting in changes in cold desert ecosystems, lending urgency to the need to understand climate change effects and develop effective adaptation strategies. In this review, we synthesize information on changes in climate and hydrologic processes during the past century for the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau and discuss future projections for the 21st century. We develop midcentury projections of temperature and climate for the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau at timescales relevant to managers (2020-2050) and discuss concepts and strategies for adapting to the...

The boundary between woodlands and shrublands delineates the distribution of the tree biome in many regions across the globe. Woodlands and shrublands interface at multiple spatial scales, and many ecological processes operate at different spatial scales to determine the position of the woodland-shrubland boundary. The overall objective of this dissertation was to examine processes affecting vegetation dynamics at the woodland-shrubland interface in the western United States, at spatial scales ranging from biomes to individual plants. In Chapter 1, I examined broad-scale drivers of the...