Treesearch

Hostile winds yanked at the yellow transect tapes. Stephanie Yelenik and fellow researchers plodded on, endeavoring to place tapes in an organized grid. Their field site stretched across the fire-scorched sagebrush steppe of Peavine Mountain in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest near Reno, Nevada. The team of Forest Service and University of Nevada scientists were setting up experimental plots to test native seeding strategies.

Did you know your cellphone’s GPS locations can help us decipher how recreationists and wildlife overlap in time and space? Mark Ditmer, a research ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, and colleagues harnessed this cellphone-derived human mobility data to explore how managers can enhance recreation and protect wildlife in sensitive habitats.

In early 2024, Michael Caggiano, a wildland firefighter and regional fire analyst with the Forest Service, approached David Flores, a research social scientist with the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, with a proposal: what about conducting a research study on the perspectives of wildland firefighters around food catering?

For nearly 100 years, the Forest Service has inventoried America’s forest resources to provide a scorecard of forest health, vitality, and sustainability. Born out of the McSweeney-McNary Forest Research Act of 1928, the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program is nationally coordinated by regional experts and now consists of more than 355,000 survey plots across public and private land.

During periods of heightened wildland fire activity in the United States, multiagency coordinating groups must prioritize among multiple on-going fires to allocate scarce suppression resources. While many studies have explored factors that influence wildfire suppression expenditures and personnel allocation, understanding the specific factors that affect daily wildfire prioritization has remained unexplored. In this study, we first examine wildfire reporting and ranking processes across different regions of the United States to provide insight into criteria used for fire ranking. We then...

Rapid, well-coordinated aerial response can limit wildfire growth during the initial response (IR) period. Most quantitative studies of wildland fire aviation effectiveness have relied on aircraft data from the United States Forest Service (USFS), with comparatively less attention to other agencies. This study leverages open ADS-B data to reconstruct second-by-second aircraft movements for both the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) and USFS fleets during the 2020 California fire season, enabling the first direct cross-agency comparison of operational use. We...

Wilderness areas often provide critical habitat for native fishes. However, the remoteness of wilderness areas can limit fish monitoring efforts, such that changes in nonnative and native fish distributions may not be detected and management responses may be delayed. Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling offers a non-invasive and efficient method to monitor aquatic species across remote waterways. We used eDNA sampling and species-specific qPCR analysis to assess distributions of nonnative brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) and native bull trout (S. confluentus) and Columbia River redband...

Translocation is implemented worldwide as a conservation strategy for rare and endangered plant species, yet the factors that influence long-term success remain poorly understood. Remnant wild populations are often used as indicators to model habitat preference and select translocation sites, but such populations may be refugia from past biological or anthropogenic stressors and represent sub-optimal habitat conditions for focal taxa. To test assumptions about habitat preferences of rare species, we conducted a four-year experimental translocation of the Critically Endangered Hawaiian...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Wyoming. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all...

Homeowner wildfire risk mitigation and preparedness are important components of community wildfire readiness. This report describes the data collected through two efforts conducted in the Lake County, Colorado, study area: (1) parcel-level rapid wildfire risk assessments performed by trained assessors and (2) homeowner surveys in which respondents provided self-assessments of their parcel-level wildfire risk. This project was undertaken to support Colorado State Forest Service Salida Field Office and Leadville/Lake County Fire-Rescue. The household surveys explored the social dimensions of...