Treesearch

An erosion control product made by shredding on-site woody materials was evaluated for mitigating erosion through a series of rainfall simulations. Tests were conducted on bare soil and soil with 30, 50, and 70% cover on a coarse and a fine-grained soil. Results indicated that the wood product known as wood shreds reduced runoff and soil loss from both soil types. Erosion mitigation ranged from 60 to nearly 100% depending on the soil type and amount of concentrated flow and wood shred cover. Wood shreds appear to be a viable alternative to agricultural straw. A wood shred cover of 50%...

Management of public lands occurs today with high levels of scrutiny and controversy. To succeed, managers seek the support, involvement, and endorsement of the public. This study examines trust as an indicator of managerial success and attempts to identify and measure the components that most influence it. A review of trust literature yielded 14 attributes that were hypothesized to contribute to trust, grouped into the three dimensions of Shared Norms and Values, Willingness to Endorse, and Perceived Efficacy. Operationalizing these attributes and dimensions, a telephone survey was...

This event in NorCal is another of the major events we have experienced in fire management. In line with our desire to learn, we ought to line up a team to help us capture lessons learned from this event." This statement, and a regional delegation, was the impetus for an information collection team from the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center to visit with agency administrators, local unit and fire management personnel during October 2008. Information collection teams from the Lessons Learned Center are not dispatched to evaluate, review or assess performance. The team is only interested...

An excessive number of highly impacted campsites led managers of the Caney Creek Wilderness to attempt to reduce campsite impacts with a program of trail relocation, education, closure of selected campsites, and site restoration. The strategy involved increasing the concentration of use somewhat, without resorting to the restrictiveness of a designated campsite policy. To assess success, all campsites in the wilderness were inventoried in 1994 and their condition was assessed. A subsequent reassessment of campsites, in 2007, indicated the management program was highly successful. The total...

The last 50 years or so have seen a steady increase in the rate of destructive wildfires across the world, partly as a result of climate change and partly as a result of encroachment of human settlement on fire-based ecosystems (Russell et al. 2004; Westerling et al. 2006). Years of active fire suppression in such areas has inevitably led to the build-up of hazardous fuel loads, creating ideal conditions for destructive wildfires (Johnson et al. 2001). Recently, serious wildfires have occurred in Australia, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean, as well as those occurring in the USA in...

In 2008, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) began piloting a "new" concept in fire management: managing "fire as fire" on the landscape; no more black-and-white distinctions between "good" fire and "bad" fire. Instead, under the new direction, the USFS manages the fire based on what the land, the long-term objectives, the land management plan, the social-political situation, and the weather suggest. For example, the USFS staff may attack a flank of the fire that has a high probability of moving aggressively into a housing subdivision, but may only monitor the flank of a fire moving through...

Like many arid and semiarid regions, the Great Basin of the western United States is undergoing major ecological, social, and economic changes that are having widespread detrimental effects on the structure, composition, and function of native ecosystems. The causes of change are highly interactive and include urban, suburban, and exurban growth, past and present land uses, climate change, altered fire regimes, and rapid expansion of invasive species. Cumulative effects include vegetation type conversions, loss of watershed functioning, loss of native species, and diminished economic...

The cold desert of North America, sometimes referred to as the Intermountain area, is comprised of a western Great Basin section and an eastern Colorado Plateau section. In general, the cold desert receives more than half of its annual precipitation as snow, and because of its more northern latitude or higher elevations, has relatively low average annual temperatures. Snow cover is common and may last for weeks, yet summers can be hot. The Great Basin section is slightly cooler than the Colorado Plateau section and receives less summer precipitation. Droughts are common, especially in the...

Maps of the wildland-urban interface (WUI) are both policy tools and powerful visual images. Although the growing number of WUI maps serve similar purposes, this article indicates that WUI maps derived from the same data sets can differ in important ways related to their original intended application. We discuss the use of ancillary data in modifying census data to improve WUI maps and offer a cautionary note about this practice. A comparison of two WUI mapping approaches suggests that no single map is "best" because users' needs vary. The analysts who create maps are responsible for...

Considering variation, or conditionality, in the ways that plants compete for resources, facilitate or indirectly interact with each other has been crucial for understanding the relative importance of these interactions in the organization of plant communities (Tilman 1985; Wilson & Keddy 1986; Kitzberger, Steinaker & Veblen 2000; Levine 2000; Brooker et al. 2005; Baumeister & Callaway 2006). Such conditionality may also be important for allelopathic interactions, but to our knowledge there have been no explicit, quantitative studies of conditional allelopathic effects or of the mechanisms...