Treesearch

Theory predicts that effective environmental governance requires that the scales of management account for the scales of environmental processes. A good example is community wildfire protection planning. Plan boundaries that are too narrowly defined may miss sources of wildfire risk originating at larger geographic scales whereas boundaries that are too broadly defined dilute resources. Although the concept of scale (mis)matches is widely discussed in literature on risk mitigation as well as environmental governance more generally, rarely has the concept been rigorously quantified. We...

Background. The rising occurrence of simultaneous large wildfires has put strain on United States national fire management capacity leading to increasing reliance on assistance from partner nations abroad. However, limited analysis exists on international resource-sharing patterns and the factors influencing when resources are requested and deployed. Aims. This study examines the drivers of international fire management ground and overhead personnel deployed to the United States. Methods. Using descriptive statistics and case examples data from 2008 to 2020, this study investigates the...

Applying an interaction framework, we examined whether climate change and combined land use and disturbance changes were synergistic, antagonistic, or neutral for forest issues of wildfires, tree growth, tree species distributions, species invasions and outbreaks, and deer herbivory, focused on the eastern United States generally since the 1800s and the development of instrumental records (1895). Climate largely has not warmed during 1981-2020 compared to 1895-1980, but precipitation has increased. Increased precipitation and land use (encompassing fire exclusion and forestation, with...

Globally, in remaining wildlands, tree densities and forested cover have increased in grasslands and open forests since European settlement. In the southern Rocky Mountains of Colorado, United States, we determined tree composition and tree cover from historical (years 1875 to 1896) surveys and compared them to current (2002 to 2011) tree composition and current (year 2016) forested land cover for 500,000 ha of the Routt National Forest. Additionally, we examined whether changes in precipitation occurred. Regarding composition, pine (primarily lodgepole pine; Pinus contorta) decreased from...

Current locations of species may not be suited to future climate, resulting in ranges that shift to higher latitudes, with potential for range expansion or contraction in extent. To identify potential shifts in distributions of 119 tree species centered in the United States and Canada, I modeled species occurrences under current climate and then predicted to past (20, 10, and 6 thousand years ago) and future climates (six projections during 2071–2100 for North American warming of 4.3 ◦C to 8.8 ◦C), with a singular focus on the climate space of tree species, or bioclimatic envelope models....

Since Euro-American settlement and associated fire exclusion, grasslands and open forests have converted to forests throughout the United States. Contributing to the weight of evidence, we determined if forestation also occurred in forests and grasslands of Colorado. Our study extent encompassed landscapes of the 0.5 million ha Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests in the northern Front Range (eastern side) of the southern Rocky Mountains and the 1 million haWeld County, which contains Pawnee National Grassland, in the Great Plains grasslands. We quantified tree composition, cover, and...

Global changes in climate and land use are threatening natural ecosystems, biodiversity, and the ecosystem services people rely on. This is why it is necessary to track and monitor spatiotemporal change at a level of detail that can inform science, management, and policy development. The current constellation of multiple Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites collecting imagery at predominantly ≤30-m spatial resolution affords an opportunity for the generation of global medium- resolution products every few days. Our goal is to both identify the information needs and provide direction towards...

Remotely sensed data are frequently used for predicting and mapping ecosystem characteristics, and spatially explicit wall-to-wall information is sometimes proposed as the best possible source of information for decision-making. However, wall-to-wall information typically relies on model-based prediction, and several features of model-based prediction should be understood before extensively relying on this type of information. One such feature is that model-based predictors can be considered both unbiased and biased at the same time, which has important implications in several areas of...

Long-term field studies are the gold standard for learning and proof-of- concept in applied forest ecology. In the northern Rocky Mountains, USA, researchers have showcased the enduring effects of fire hazard reduction and restoration treatments at the Lubrecht Fire and Fire Surrogate study. This study demonstrates the extra benefit of reduced severity to insect outbreak following mechanical treatments. Combined mechanical and fire treatments prove to have long-lasting restoration effects, including regenerating desirable tree species. Thanks to the simple design and clear results, this...

This scientific commentary refers to `Stem heating results in hydraulic dysfunction in Symplocos tinctoria: implications for post-fire tree death' by Hoffmann et al. (https://doi.org/10.1093/treephys/tpae023).How does fire kill trees? This is a fundamental question to which we surprisingly do not have the answer. The capacity to predict when and where trees will die due to fire is important for addressing a range of applied research problems, such as modelling fire effects on vegetation and dependent fauna, carbon emissions and modelling future fire regimes. As fire regimes continue to...