Treesearch

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Coronado National Forest prepared this programmatic environmental impact statement to disclose the potential effects of a proposed action to revise the "Coronado National Forest Land and Resource Management Plan" (1986, as amended). The Coronado comprises 1,783,639 acres, most of which are located in southeastern Arizona, and 70,729 acres of which are in southwestern New Mexico.This document reports the results of an effects analysis of management direction in a no action alternative (i.e., the existing forest plan); the proposed action...

Semi-arid forests are in a period of rapid transition as a result of unprecedented landscape scale fires, insect outbreaks, drought, and anthropogenic land use practices. Understanding how historically episodic disturbances led to coherent forest structural and spatial patterns that promoted resilience and resistance is a critical part of addressing change. Here my coauthors and I apply metabolic scaling theory (MST) to examine scaling behavior and structural patterns of semi-arid conifer forests in Arizona and New Mexico. We conceptualize a linkage to mechanistic drivers of forest...

Species distribution models (SDMs) were built with US Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) publicly available plot coordinates, which are altered for plot security purposes, and compared with SDMs built with true plot coordinates. Six species endemic to the western US, including four junipers (Juniperus deppeana var. deppeana, J. monosperma, J. occidentalis, J. osteosperma) and two pinons (Pinus edulis, P. monophylla), were analyzed. The presence-absence models based on current climatic variables were generated over a series of species-specific modeling extents using Random Forests and...

Large, severe fires are ecologically and socially important because they have lasting effects on vegetation and soils, can potentially threaten people and property, and can be costly to manage. The goals of the Fire Severity Mapping Project (FIRESEV), which covers lands in the continental western United States, are to understand where and why fires burn severely, and to give fire managers, fire ecologists, and natural resource managers tools to assess severity before, during, and after a wildfire. FIRESEV has produced a suite of tools for a wide range of fire management applications,...

New home building in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) continues unabated, despite the high financial and human costs of fighting fires in these areas. The goal of this research is to understand, through surveys and expert assessments, the attitudes and perceptions of WUI homeowners as they relate to taking action to reduce wildfire risk on their property. It also addresses whether there is a difference between their perceptions of the wildfire risk on their property and an expert’s assessment. In a two-county survey in Colorado, it was found that the most important sources of information...

In the coming decades, population growth, economic growth, and associated land-use changes - in concert with climate change - will influence forests and rangelands in the Interior West. Society’s demand for ecosystem goods and services continues to increase as human and biophysical change alter the productive capacity of these lands. The 2010 RPA Assessment uses scenario-based socioeconomic and climatic projections to analyze these natural resource trends. Geographic variation throughout the Interior West will determine local trends, but regional trends project population growth around...

Western white pine (Pinus monticola) is a species that used to dominate the forests of the Interior Northwest prior to the expansion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the late 19th century. Its foundational role contributed to a landscape that was resilient, fire-adapted, and provided abundant suitable habitat for terrestrial and aquatic species. However, substantial harvesting and the early 20th century introduction of the invasive fungal pathogen that causes white pine blister rust disease combined with other factors to fundamentally alter the forested landscape of the Interior...

Climate change is not only causing temperatures to rise, it is also altering the amount and type of precipitation that falls across the western United States. Research shows a trend of increasingly dry "dry years," meaning droughts are becoming more severe and streams are flowing lower during these periods.

Blackbrush (Colegyne ramosissima) is a desert shrubland species that is currently dominant on over three million acres of the transition zone between the cold desert of the Great Basin and the warm desert of the southwestern United States. Western landscapes are projected to experience unprecedented changes as the climate warms, and researchers at the Rocky Mountain Research Station have been studying the response of this species to assess whether it can move upward in elevation and latitude. Blackbrush was found to have two distinct populations (in the warmer Mojave Desert and the cooler...

Chalcophora angulicollis (LeConte) and Chalcophora virginiensis (Drury) are shown to be valid allopatric species in the western and eastern forests of North America, respectively. The historic uncertainty regarding their status is reviewed, and new characters of the aedeagus, penultimate maxillary palpomere, and elytral serrations are utilized for their identification. This information is combined with redescriptions, diagnoses, illustrations, and a key for all species of Chalcophora Dejean in North America north of Mexico.