Treesearch

The historic Wilderness Act celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2014, and wilderness social science shared a similar legacy. As paradoxical as it might seem, humans are an important part of wilderness, helping to define the very concept and representing an important component of wilderness use and management. Much of the past five decades of wilderness-related social science has focused on recreational use, documenting the impacts of recreation on wilderness resources and the quality of the wilderness experience, exploring application of the concept of recreational carrying capacity to...

Coarse woody debris (CWD) serves a variety of ecological functions in forests, and the understanding of its decomposition is needed for estimating changes in CWD-dependent forest biodiversity, and for the quantification of forest ecosystem carbon and nutrient pools and fluxes. Boreal forests are often intensively managed, so information is needed on the effects of timber harvesting on wood decomposition, and the factors controlling the decomposition process. Therefore, decomposition of standard wood stakes of Scots pine, loblolly pine, and aspen were monitored in an uncut forest and in an...

Changes in forest stand structure may alter the activity of invertase, urease, catalase and phenol oxidase after thinning Pinus tabuliformis (Carriére) plantations in Yanqing County of Beijing, China. We examined changes in these soil enzymes as influenced by time since thinning (24, 32, and 40 years since thinning) for 3 seasons (spring, summer and autumn) following harvesting at two depths in the mineral soil (0-10 cm and 10-20 cm). Invertase and urease increased significantly with time since thinning. Catalase activity was highest in the 24-year-old stand and there were no statistically...

Annual streamflows have decreased across mountain watersheds in the Pacific Northwest of the United States over the last ~70 years; however, in some watersheds, observed annual flows have increased. Physically based models are useful tools to reveal the combined effects of climate and vegetation on long-term water balances by explicitly simulating the internal watershed hydrological fluxes that affect discharge.We used the physically based Simultaneous Heat and Water (SHAW) model to simulate the inter-annual hydrological dynamics of a 4 km2 watershed in northern Idaho. The model simulates...

The Olympic Power Company was formed in 1910 with financing from Chicago investors to lure a pulp mill to Port Angeles, Washington. The Elwha and Glines Canyon dams were built on the Elwha River, most of which runs through the Olympic Wilderness of Olympic National Park.

Wilderness has played an invaluable role in the development of wildland fire science. Since Agee’s review of the subject 15 years ago, tremendous progress has been made in the development of models and data, in understanding the complexity of wildland fire as a landscape process, and in appreciating the social factors that influence the use of wilderness fire. Regardless of all we have learned, though, the reality is that fire remains an extraordinarily complex process with variable effects that create essential heterogeneity in ecosystems. Whereas some may view this variability as a...

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in northern Minnesota is one of the most iconic and cherished wilderness areas in the United States. One of the original wilderness areas established in 1964, the BWCAW protects a glaciated landscape of about 1,175 lakes, connected by several hundred miles of streams. Located adjacent to Canada's Quetico Provincial Park (also managed as wilderness), the two areas form a transboundary wilderness of about 2 million acres. Among the most heavily used wilderness areas in the United States (Cole 1996), most travel is by canoe, although motorized...

This special issue of the Journal of Forestry provides an overview of America’s National Wilderness Preservation System and highlights the important role that science serves in informing wilderness stewardship. The lead authors of the articles in this volume selected the Journal because it is highly respected and widely circulated among foresters and federal land managers in the various natural resource agencies that manage wilderness across the nation. But many in America value wilderness, and we know this issue will be appreciated by all who hold these lands dear. We applaud the generosit...

President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law on Sept. 3, 1964. In this photo, LBJ hands the pen he used to Alice Zahniser while naturalist, author, adventurer, and conservationist Mardy Murie (standing behind her) looks on.

The National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS) is a vital component of the national and international infrastructure for science, education, and information. The NWPS serves as an important resource for advancing research, from discovering new dinosaurs (Arbour et al. 2014, Landon 2016) to understanding human history on the American landscape (Rasic 2003). The NWPS provides invaluable records of environmental change and coverage of important types of ecosystems and natural resource systems (Aycrigg et al. 2016).