Treesearch

Mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins, is the most significant mortality agent in pine forests of western North America. Silvicultural treatments that reduce the number of susceptible host trees, alter age and size class distributions, and diversify species composition are considered viable, long-term options for reducing stand susceptibility to mountain pine beetle-caused tree mortality. Short-term efficacy of thinning treatments has been evaluated, but long-term efficacy has not. We evaluated mountain pine beetle-caused lodgepole pine mortality in 2008, ~28 years after...

Seed transfer guidelines and zones are used to manage the movement of plant materials, but by the end of the century many landscapes across the globe will have climates that are incompatible with current vegetation. The mismatch in rates between climate change and plant migration and adaptation will pose significant challenges for natural resource managers, especially when scientific information often lags behind the demand for management actions. We developed a bibliography to reflect the growing interest in assisted migration, the intentional movement of plant materials in response to...

A fundamental goal of forest biogeography is to understand the factors that drive spatiotemporal variability in forest growth across large areas (e.g., states or regions). The ancillary collection of increment cores as part of the IW FIA Program represents an important non-traditional role for the development of unprecedented data sets. Individual-tree growth data from increment cores were paired with plot-level variables from the inventory to investigate the spatiotemporal growth patterns for Douglas-fir, ponderosa pine, common pinyon, and limber pine over the northern portion of the...

Raster modeling is an integral component of spatial analysis. However, conventional raster modeling techniques can require a substantial amount of processing time and storage space, often limiting the types of analyses that can be performed. To address this issue, we have developed Function Modeling. Function Modeling is a new modeling framework that streamlines the raster modeling process by utilizing delayed reading methods. Using this approach, we have successfully characterized the impacts of fuel treatments on soil erosion, estimated basal area, trees, and tons of above ground biomass...

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) is an ecologically important species in high-altitude, mid-latitude areas of western North America due to the habitat and food source it provides for many wildlife species. Recent concerns about the long-term viability of whitebark pine stands have arisen in the face of high mortality due to a combination of fire suppression, white pine blister rust, and mountain pine beetle outbreaks. Most previous studies of whitebark pine have focused on pure stands, yet the spatially representative Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) dataset shows that whitebark pine...

Pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) are the principal dispersal agent for pinyon pine seeds in the Great Basin region of the Intermountain West. However, Pinyon jays have exhibited significant population declines over much their range in recent decades, even as pinyon-juniper woodlands appear to have been expanding over the past 150 years. In order to identify and quantify habitat preferences for nesting, seed caching, and general foraging within the woodlands of the Great Basin, we measured stand and tree parameters of Pinyon jay nest, forage and cache sites in Idaho and Nevada using...

Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Lidar was selected by NASA for funding under its Earth Venture Instrument-2 program. A full-waveform lidar instrument will be attached to the International Space Station (ISS) and will provide unprecedented detail about the structure of the world’s forest between 52°S and 52°N (the area covered by the ISS ground track). One of GEDI’s science objectives is to quantify the distribution of above-ground forest biomass at fine spatial resolution, i.e., at the 500x500 meter pixel level. We will present the sampling design and estimators for average...

The North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) project’s Attribution Team is completing nationwide processing of historic Landsat data to provide a comprehensive annual, wall-to-wall analysis of US disturbance history, with attribution, over the last 25+ years. Per-pixel time series analysis based on a new nonparametric curve fitting algorithm yields several metrics useful for elucidating causal processes underlying forest disturbance dynamics but requires CPU-intensive computation across large data sets (>4 billion pixels classified as forest in 434 Landsat scenes covering the conterminous...

Users of Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data sometimes compare historic and current forest inventory estimates, despite warnings that such comparisons may be tenuous. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate a method for obtaining a more accurate and representative reference dataset using data collected at co-located plots (i.e., plots that were measured during both periodic and annual inventories). The approach described here uses co-located plot-level data to build linear regression models that relate annual inventory measurements to periodic inventory measurements. Separate...

Questions regarding the impact of natural and anthropogenic forest change events (temporary and persisting) on energy, water and nutrient cycling, forest sustainability and resilience, and ecosystem services call for a full suite of information on the spatial and temporal trends of forest dynamics. Temporal and spatial patterns of change along with their magnitude and cause are all equally important when weaving together the full story of our forests’ history. National statistical estimation and mapping of land use and cover changes have been progressing for decades. However, especially in...