Treesearch

Outdoor recreation is expanding across public lands, yet managers lack evidence for how long wildlife responses to recreation persist and whether response duration depends on disturbance type and frequency. Using a field-based acoustic playback experiment in the Bridger–Teton National Forest, Wyoming, USA, we isolated recreation noise from other components of human presence and quantified how long mammal detections took to return to baseline. Across 12 sites over two field seasons, we broadcast motorized and non-motorized recreation sounds at rates mimicking high- and low-use trails,...

Intensifying disturbances such as high-severity wildfire and prolonged drought-related tree mortality – along with forest management activities intended to curb these disturbances – are reshaping wildlife habitat. As a result, older forest-dependent species are being affected in fire-prone forests. Yet, mapping these dynamic processes at fine spatial resolution across broad spatiotemporal scales remains challenging. Using 37 years (1986–2022) of California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis) detection data from Southern California – the subspecies' southern range limit – we...

Canopy base height (CaBH; distinct from tree-level crown base height, CrBH) represents the lowest height at which canopy fuel, aggregated across multiple tree crowns, can propagate fire vertically and serves as an essential variable for modeling crown fire transition and hazard to inform fuel reduction treatment planning. However, as fire models have been applied to increasingly diverse forest structures and remote sensing technologies have advanced, a variety of methods for characterizing CaBH have emerged. Here, we review the primary approaches for CaBH characterization using field...

Biomass supply chains face both internal challenges (low energy density, bulkiness, seasonality) and external challenges (market uncertainty). We developed a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model that configures an (s, S) inventory control policy for a willow-based pellet production facility. This model accounts for seasonal willow harvesting capacity and stochastic daily wood pellet demand. Using a case study of a proposed wood pellet production facility in Schenectady County, New York, USA, we evaluated model-suggested inventory control policies using...

Despite a growing need to expand the pace and scale of prescribed burning to address the national fire deficit, there is a lack of data-driven methods to incorporate fire danger information into prescribed fire planning. We assembled nearly two decades of prescribed fire and wildfire records across Montana and Idaho and combined these records with spatially explicit fire danger data. We implement a nonparametric cutpoint analysis to identify objective thresholds from the Energy Release Component (ERC) percentile, treating pile burns, broadcast burns, and wildfires as ordinal classes along...

Next-generation models of fire behavior and smoke production rely on gridded, 3D inputs of wildland fuel complexes. We used a hierarchically scaled sampling design to characterize canopy and surface fuels that are common to prescribed burning programs in the southeastern and western US. Sampling included airborne laser scanning, terrestrial laser scanning, close-range photogrammetry, and destructive field sampling. The objective of this study was to use a combination of airborne laser scanning (ALS), terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), structure-from-motion photogrammetry (SfM), and field...

Reliable resilience indicators are urgently needed to monitor global forest health under increasing climate stress. Lag-1 temporal autocorrelation (TAC) of satellite vegetation indices captures forest recovery speed and is widely used as a resilience metric, but its mechanistic underpinnings and methodological reliability have been questioned. Here we use Landsat observations and field data from the Amazon to investigate how satellite-derived TAC relates to in situ measurements of the hydraulic safety margin (HSM), a key physiological trait for plants’ capacity to accommodate drier...

Rising timber demand is transforming forest structure globally, profoundly affecting biodiversity and climate resilience. Logging‐driven fragmentation is potentially a major driver of biodiversity loss in production landscapes, yet its interactions with escalating climate stressors remain poorly understood.We combine two decades of Landsat‐derived habitat metrics with 29,000 surveys of the marbled murrelet ( Brachyramphus marmoratus )—an iconic Pacific Northwest old‐forest specialist seabird affecting management of >10 million hectares. Controlling for habitat amount and detection probabili...

The dataset is a spatially and temporally organized curated subset of National Infrared Operations Program real-time high-resolution fire perimeter acquisitions for the Western United States from 2020 to 2024. The U.S. Forest Service’s National Infrared Operations is an ordered resource that flies only when requested and prioritized, and which tracks and documents wildfire progression over time. Through a structured data retrieval, consolidation, and metadata curation process, the dataset organizes fire perimeters and associated attributes to facilitate the temporal and spatial reconstructi...

Understanding seasonal water budgets of wildlife is critical, as climate change alters water availability. Rocky Mountain mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus hemionus) mainly obtain water from their diet and drinking water; however, winter access to these resources varies with snow cover. To assess reliance on water sources by mule deer during winter, we longitudinally sampled female deer in Utah’s Bear River Mountains, a montane region with deep snow and ample drinking water sources, and Pine Valley, a semiarid region with little snow. We implanted physiological biologgers to record heart rate...