Treesearch

American Indian tribes value pristine water sources that often originate in wilderness areas to support provisioning and cultural benefits. Based on interviews with four traditional leaders, this article focuses on the concept of living waters in ways that connect ecosystem service benefits to wilderness. Cultural knowledge connects indigenous water stewardship and protection of living waters throughout watersheds as threats increase due to climate change and development.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in northern Minnesota has a rich history of advocacy for protection as wilderness. In the 1950s, Sigurd Olsen best described the song of the wilderness in Minnesota's north country: "I have heard the singing in many places, but I seem to hear it best in the wilderness lake country of the Quetico-Superior, where travel is still by pack and canoe over the ancient trails of the Indians and the voyageurs" (Olson 1956, p. 6).

Studies have suggested that deep snow may limit fisher (Martes pennanti) distribution, and that fisher populations may in turn limit marten (Martes americana) distribution. We tested these hypotheses in the Northern Rocky Mountains of Idaho, a region which differs from previous study areas in its climate and relative fisher and marten abundance, but in which very little is known about their distributions. We hypothesized that due to the assumed disparity in abundance between the sympatric members of the Martes genus (i.e., much greater marten abundance than fisher) fishers would not limit...

The assumption that individual preferences are rational and consistent with standard economic theory is often appropriate, but may be optimistic if consumers are uncertain about either their preferences or how the market operates. Both sources of uncertainty may present themselves in lab experiments exploring the well-known disparity between individuals' willingness to accept and willingness to pay. This paper explores the role of value uncertainty in the observed disparity, and finds that providing subjects with a value learning opportunity can reduce the value disparity to insignificance.

Paired comparison (PC) choice experiments offer researchers and policy-makers an alternative nonmarket valuation method particularly apt when a ranking of the public's priorities across policy alternatives is paramount. Similar to contingent valuation, PC choice experiments estimate the total value associated with a specific environmental good or service. Similar to choice experiments, the questions posed to respondents are choices between alternatives. In contrast to both methods, respondents in PC choice experiments make choices between pairs of dissimilar alternatives including private...

Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks are among the premier destinations in the world for wilderness travel and camping. Over 93% of the spectacular mountain country that make up these parks has been designated as wilderness, with another 4% managed as wilderness. The parks are home to the highest peak in the lower 48 states, Mt. Whitney (14,495 feet), a 97-mile stretch of the famous John Muir Trail and also 101 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. In all, there are more than 700 miles of maintained trail in the parks, as well as numerous opportunities to travel off trails. Wilderness...

In many U.S. federally designated wilderness areas, wildfires are likely to burn of their own accord due to favorable management policies and remote location. Previous research suggested that limitations on fire size can result from the evolution of natural fire regimes, specifically in places where fuels were recently reduced by previous burning. To explore the broader-scale importance of fire management on wilderness landscapes, we selected three study regions representing diverse ecosystems in the western U.S. and modeled the change in fire size distributions across a gradient defined...

Projected increases in wildfire and other climate-driven disturbances will affect populations and communities worldwide, including host-parasite relationships. Research in temperate forests has shown that wildfire can negatively affect amphibians, but this research has occurred primarily outside of managed landscapes where interactions with human disturbances could result in additive or synergistic effects. Furthermore, parasites represent a large component of biodiversity and can affect host fitness and population dynamics, yet they are rarely included in studies of how vertebrate hosts...

Fuel treatments have been widely used as a tool to reduce catastrophic wildland fire risks in many forests around the world. However, it is a challenging task for forest managers to prioritise where, when and how to implement fuel treatments across a large forest landscape. In this study, an optimisation model was developed for long-term fuel management decisions at a landscape scale. Using a simulated annealing algorithm, the model optimises locations and timing of fuel treatments, while considering changes in forest dynamics over time, fire behaviour and spread, values at risk, and...

The Fire and Climate Synthesis (FACS) project is a collaboration of about 50 fire ecologists to compile and synthesize fire and climate data for western North America. We have compiled nearly 900 multi-century fire-scar based fire histories from the western United States, Canada, and Mexico. The resulting tree-ring based fire history is the largest and most spatially extensive in the world, consisting of annually crossdated fire records for more than 3,000 years (1248 BC -2011 AD) and representing more than 15,000 site-year fire records. State space analysis indicates that the fire history...