Treesearch

This field guide is a forest management tool for field identification of biotic and abiotic agents that damage native trees in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, which constitute the USDA Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Region. The guide focuses only on tree diseases and forest insects that have significant economic, ecological, and/ or aesthetic impacts; this guide does not necessarily cover all possible damage agents. Management suggestions are provided where available. The field guide is divided into two sections: one describes both diseases and damage caused by...

Despite decades of academic work and practical management applications, the concept of visitor capacity remains controversial and inconsistently operationalized. Nevertheless, there are situations where development of a numerical estimate of capacity is important and where not doing so has resulted in land management agencies being successfully litigated. This report is a guide to developing estimates of numerical visitor capacity, with particular emphasis on wilderness. It reviews capacity concepts, surveys available approaches to capacity determination, and outlines a generic process....

The fusion of individualistic community ecology with the Hutchinsonian niche concept enabled a broad integration of ecological theory, spanning all the way from the niche characteristics of individual species, to the composition, structure, and dynamics of ecological communities. Landscape ecology has been variously described as the study of the structure, function, and management of large heterogeneous land areas. Any reading of the published landscape ecology literature shows near uniformity in the adoption of a categorical patch-mosaic paradigm. However, if biological communities are...

In this paper, we develop an econometric model of willingness to pay (WTP) that integrates data on respondent uncertainty regarding their own WTP. The integration is utility consistent, there is no recoding of variables, and no need to calibrate the contingent responses to actual payment data, so the approach can "stand alone." In an application to a valuation study related to whooping crane restoration, we find that this model generates a statistically lower expected WTP than the standard contingent valuation (CV) model. Moreover, the WTP function estimated with this model is not statistic...

This is a well-written polemic about the failure of fire policy and management in the United States. The book contains enough ecology and history for nonspecialists to understand the complexities of the policy and management dilemmas that we face today. The authors provide a particularly good treatment of the diversity of roles that fire plays in different ecosystems, and of the multitude of factors that have been contributing to alarming changes in some fire regimes.

Trust is a complicated emotion. In the past, many social scientists have studied trust. They discovered that trust involves a number of beliefs and emotions. The scientists in this study were interested in learning more about trust. They believed that forest managers can do a better job if people trust them to do what is best for citizens and the environment (figure 1).

In an era of rapid global climate change and other pervasive anthropogenic ecological insults, many scientists and managers have few qualms about taking action to mitigate the effects of these insults, including in areas that are protected by law as wilderness, wildlife refuges, or national parks. For example, habitat is manipulated to sustain populations of selected threatened and endangered species, nonindigenous invasive species are removed, and extirpated species are reintroduced. Even with important technical advances in the ecological sciences over the last several decades, ecologists...

Climate change and shifting demographics influence the landscape and the social and economic systems of the Interior West. Climate change impacts are already evident, as seen in declining snowpacks, changes in runoff timing and intensity, increasing fire frequency and severity, increasing drought frequency and severity, and rising temperatures.

There is a recognized need to apply and maintain fuel treatments to reduce catastrophic wildland fires. A number of models and decision support systems have been developed for addressing different aspects of fuel treatments while considering other important resource management issues and constraints. Although these models address diverse aspects of the fuel treatment-planning problem, no one model adequately handles the strategic maintenance scheduling of fuel treatments while considering 1) the spatial and temporal changes of fuel treatment effects on a landscape, and 2) the economics of...

In the new millennium, national leaders and policymakers are facing profound issues regarding people and the environment. Experimental Forests and Ranges (EFRs), managed by the Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), form a network of locations amenable to the development of long-term data collection across many major ecosystems of the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii. Truly long-term data sets dealing with range and grasslands are rare but do exist. Unfortunately, the status of older studies, in terms of longevity and variables monitored, are incompletely...