Treesearch

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Montana. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Montana. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all...

Over the past three decades, joint land and water management approaches involving two or more parties have been increasingly applied across the US federal government, including through shared stewardship arrangements with American Indian Tribes (Washburn 2022). Shared stewardship refers to voluntary partnerships to align goals, share data, and coordinate action around decisions regarding land and water, with or without the transfer of legal decision-making authority (US Department of Agriculture [USDA] 2018). Many scholars recognize that shared stewardship approaches can strengthen Tribal...

The 1964 Wilderness Act is a landmark piece of legislation, providing robust protections from development, mechanization, and resource extraction to landscapes designated by the US Congress as federal wilderness. Today, the National Wilderness Preservation System, which includes 806 wilderness areas and 111 million acres, represents the world’s largest highly protected conservation network. However, a long-standing ethos of nonmanagement - exemplified by the philosophy that managers should be guardians but not gardeners - obscures long legacies of Indigenous stewardship and may not sustain...

Increasing ecological perturbations resulting from global change processes are altering the environmental predictability (EP) of critical forage and water resources for wildlife. While research has furthered our understanding of how EP both underlies and directs animal movement, studies have mainly focused on relationships between EP and large-scale movement behaviors (e.g. migration) at the species level, neglecting the mediating influence that environmental context has on the behavior of wide-ranging species. We address these knowledge gaps by examining how EP of forage in mule deer...

Escalating wildfire frequency and severity are altering wildland habitats worldwide. Yet investigations into fire impacts on wildlife habitat rarely extend to the macroecological scales relevant to species conservation and global change processes. We evaluate the effects of wildfire on habitat quality and selection by large mammals spanning three trophic levels in the Western United States. We analyze 12 years of GPS telemetry data for 2966 mule deer Odocoileus hemionus , 52 black bears Ursus americanus , and 74 cougars Puma concolor across Utah and Nevada, USA. Over 800 areas burned...

In arid and semiarid regions, extreme, extended droughts are becoming more frequent due to climate change. Drought is driving wildlife to seek out food or water resources where they are not as limited, such as in irrigated croplands. We collected GPS locations from 41 mule deer, a generalist herbivore reliant on primary productivity, within three study areas in Utah, USA, during a summer without drought conditions and a summer with extreme drought. This natural experiment provided an opportunity to assess how mule deer shifted their habitat selection, specifically whether drought increased...

Drylands experience highly variable and potentially unpredictable interannual climate patterns which can cause post-fire seedings to occur during years with unfavorable climatic conditions. Repeated annual seeding combined with higher seeding rates show promise to improve post-wildfire restoration outcomes in drylands by increasing the likelihood that seeding occurs during a year with favorable weather conditions and overcoming potential establishment barriers from lower seeding rates when weather conditions are favorable. While combining these two techniques is an expensive proposition at...

To reverse range-wide population declines, managers of black-tailed and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) require information on the vital rates and life stages most influential to population growth to target effective management actions. We extracted black-tailed and mule deer vital rates from a range-wide literature review and used hierarchical models to summarize vital rates, their variability, and how they correlate with one another. We then used matrix models and life-stage simulation analysis to determine the individual vital rates that contributed most to annual population growth rate...

Introduction: Outcomes of ecological restoration treatments can be highly variable and challenging to generalize, even for the same treatment type applied in similar ecological communities at different times and places. Notable examples are the herbicide and seeding treatments that have been extensively applied across the perennial sagebrush steppe of the United States to reduce impacts of fire-promoting exotic annual grasses (EAGs) such as Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum). Objectives: We asked if statistically based generalizations about the effects of pre-emergent herbicide and drill seeding...