Treesearch

A societal decision to protect over 9 million acres of land and water for its wilderness character in the early 1960s reflected US wealth in natural resources, pride in the nation's cultural history and our commitment to the well-being of future generations to both experience wild nature and enjoy benefits flowing from these natural ecosystems. There is no question that our relationship with wilderness has changed. Individually it is probably quite easy to examine differences in the role wilderness plays in the quality of our lives today compared to some previous time. But how the role of...

We investigate three sources of bias in valuation methods for ecosystem risk: failure to consider substitution possibilities between goods, failure to consider nonseparability of ecosystem services with market goods, and failure to consider substitution possibilities between ecosystems. The first two biases are known in the literature, and we offer insight on the size of the bias for a specific example. Our work on spatially transferable risk is novel.We develop the concept and show how it may undermine typical invasion prevention strategies. We find three key results. First, partial...

Topographic attributes play a critical role in predicting erosion in models such as the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP). The effects of four different high resolution hillslope profiles were studied using four different DTM resolutions: 1-m, 3-m, 5-m and 10-m. The WEPP model used a common scenario encountered in the forest environment and the selected hillslope profiles to calculate the average annual runoff, average annual soil loss and average annual sediment delivery. The DTM resolution affects the slope steepness as well as the erosion and sediment delivery predicted by WEPP....

Despite the perceived value of DSS in informing environmental and natural resource management, DSS tools often fail to be adopted by intended end users. By drawing together the experience of a global group of EDSS developers, we have identified and assessed key challenges in EDSS development and offer recommendations to resolve them. Challenges related to engaging end users in EDSS development emphasise the need for a participatory process that embraces end users and stakeholders throughout the design and development process. Adoption challenges concerned with individual and organisational...

WILD9 convened in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, in 2009 with a challenging agenda. For more than eight days, 1,800 delegates from more than 50 nations gathered to feel, think, and act (siente, piensa, actua) on many important conservation issues requiring international cooperation. The compilation of papers from the Symposium on Science and Stewardship to Protect and Sustain Wilderness Values is now available online, in hard copy, and on CD by mail order.

Scientists at the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, in Missoula, MT, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Montana, are developing a tool to help forest managers prioritize forest fuel reduction treatments. Although several computer models analyze fuels and fire behavior, stand-level effects of fuel treatments, and priority planning for land management, OptFuels will be the first to integrate these into one decision support tool for strategic placement and maintenance of fuel treatments on national forests.

Fuel treatments are a vital part of forest management - but when faced with limited budgets, narrow burning windows, and air quality restrictions, it can be challenging to prioritize where, when, and how fuel treatments should be applied across the landscape to achieve the most benefi t. To help ease this process, land managers can turn to various standalone models, capabilities, and decision support systems. While these tools address various aspects of fuel treatments, there is no one integrated solution that can provide the combined functionality needed to handle the strategic scheduling...

Assessing forest productivity is important for developing effective management regimes and predicting future growth. Despite some important limitations, the most common means for quantifying forest stand-level potential productivity is site index (SI). Another measure of productivity is gross primary production (GPP). In this paper, SI is compared with GPP estimates obtained from 3-PG and NASA's MODIS satellite. Models were constructed that predict SI and both measures of GPP from climate variables. Results indicated that a nonparametric model with two climate-related predictor variables...

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, the public and federal land management agencies continue to search for a better understanding of the benefits and costs of inclusion of new areas within the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS). There are numerous U.S. federal lands considered suitable for inclusion in the NWPS. Forest Service lands that are potential candidates for future Wilderness designation are managed as Inventoried Roadless Areas under the Roadless Rule of 2001, Wilderness Study Areas that have been designated by Congress for...

Assessment of water yields from watersheds into streams and rivers is critical to managing water supply and supporting aquatic life. Surface runoff typically contributes the most to peak discharge of a hydrograph while subsurface flow dominates the falling limb of hydrograph and baseflow contributes to streamflow from shallow unconfined aquifers primarily during the non-rainy season. The Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model is a physically-based, distributed-parameter, continuous-simulation model. Recent improvements to WEPP include enhanced computation of evapotranspiration (ET)...