Treesearch

A synthesis for fire managers summarizes and interprets a body of information, presents its meaning in an objective, unbiased way, and describes its implications for decisionmakers. Following are suggestions for ways to strengthen syntheses on fire and on other natural resource issues: Include managers, scientists, and science delivery specialists in planning, developing, and delivering syntheses. If a synthesis has unique regional components, include someone from each region in the planning team and consider these needs in writing and packaging. Use managers as authors, co-authors, or...

Hydrogeomorphic processes operating at watershed, process zone and site scales influence the distribution of riparian vegetation. However, most studies examining the relationships between hydrogeomorphic processes and riparian vegetation are conducted at site scales. We quantified the relative importance of watershed, process zone and site geomorphic characteristics for predicting riparian plant community types and plant species abundances in four small mountain watersheds in central Nevada, USA.

Main results and important changes in China’s NFI are documented, both to support continued trend analysis and to provide data users with historical perspective. New technologies and data needs ensure that the Chinese NFI, like the national inventories in other countries, will continue to evolve. Within the context of historical change and current conditions, likely directions for this evolution are suggested.

Tomorrow’s forests face extreme pressures from contemporary climate change, invasive pests, and anthropogenic demands for other land uses. These pressures, collectively, demand land managers to reassess current and potential forest management practices. We discuss three considerations, functional restoration, assisted migration, and bioengineering, which are currently being debated in the literature and have the potential to be applied independently or concurrently across a variety of scales. The emphasis of functional restoration is to reestablish or maintain functions provided by the...

In two hemiboreal mixed spruce-hardwood forests in north-east Estonia, we studied (1) which factors affect tree regeneration survival and development during the first post-storm decade and (2) how these effects change in time. Regeneration height and mortality of the tree species black alder (Alnus glutinosa (L.) J. Gaertn.), birch (Betula pendula Roth., Betula pubescens Ehrh.), Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst.) and European rowan (Sorbus aucuparia L.) were analysed in moderately and heavily damaged stands, in two types of windstorm-created microsites, i.e. root-plate pits and mounds...

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of agricultural land afforestation on soil characteristics. Two sites in two regions of the Czech Republic were evaluated, at lower as well as higher submountain elevations: in the regions of the Orlicke hory Mts. and Kostelec nad Cernymi lesy, afforested, arable and pasture lands were compared for basic chemical and physical characteristics. It was determined: pH, CEC, exchangeable nutrients, SOC, bulk density, volume density, porosity (differentiated by pore size), water conductivity and soil aggregate stability. This study demonstrated...

This field guide provides a framework for rapidly evaluating post-fire resilience to disturbance, or recovery potential, and resistance to invasive annual grasses, and for determining the need and suitability of the burned area for seeding. The framework identifies six primary components that largely determine resilience to disturbance, resistance to invasive grasses, and potential successional pathways following wildfire, as well as the information sources and tools needed to evaluate each component. The components are: (1) characteristics of the ecological site; (2) vegetation composition...

Wildfire management now emphasizes fire-adapted communities that coexist with wildfires, although it is unclear how communities will progress to this goal. Hazards research suggests that response to wildfire - specifically, rebuilding after fire - may be a crucial opportunity for homeowner and community adaptation. We explore rebuilding after the 2010 Fourmile Canyon Fire from Boulder, CO, that destroyed 165 homes, to better understand individual and community adaptation after wildfire. We examined changes in perception of fire risk and structural characteristics and vegetation mitigation...

Forest fires have been serious menace, many times resulting in tremendous economic, cultural and ecological damage to many parts of the United States. One particular area that has been significantly affected is the water quality of streams and lakes in the water thirsty southwestern United States. This is because the surface water coming off burned areas has resulted in very serious and immediate water quality problems in streams, lakes and reservoirs in Arizona and the Southwest by introducing hazardous chemicals into the water bodies. The authors have examined data from two of the...

We report the sequencing and assembly of three transcriptomes from Big (Artemisia tridentatassp. wyomingensis and A. tridentatassp. tridentata) and Low (A. arbuscula ssp. arbuscula) sagebrush. The sequence reads are available in the Sequence Read Archive of NCBI. We demonstrate the utilities of these transcriptomes for gene discovery and phylogenomic analysis. An assembly of 61,883 transcripts followed by transcript identification by the program TRAPID revealed 16 transcripts directly related to terpene synthases, proteins critical to the production of multiple secondary metabolites in...