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Fire managers often model pine needles as 1 h timelag fuels, but fuelbed properties may significantly change the rate at which needles exchange moisture with the atmosphere. The problem of determining whether moisture loss from fine fuels is being controlled by individual particles or by the fuelbed remains unresolved. Results from this laboratory experiment indicate that first-period timelags of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) needles are altered by fuelbed loading and needle arrangement. Timelags of individual needles ranged from 3.3 to 5.3 h; timelags of beds of vertically...

The Interior West Resource Inventory, Monitoring, and Evaluation (IWRIME) Program of the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station (formerly the Intermountain Research Station), as part of its national Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) duties, entered into a cooperative agreement with the Northern Region for the inventory of the National Forests in Region 1. This report presents the highlights of the Bitterroot National Forest 1995 inventory, using commonly requested variables and summaries. The information presented in this report is based solely on the IWRIME inventory...

The Interior West Forest Inventory and Analysis (IWFIA) program of the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, as part of its national Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) duties, conducted forest resource inventories of the Southwestern Region (Region 3) National Forests. This report presents highlights of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest 1996 inventory, including tree population estimates and summaries of commonly requested variables.

The understory is an oft-neglected element in landscape modeling. Most landscape models focus on the dominant vegetation and how it responds over successional time to climate, competitive interactions, and disturbance (Keane et al. 2004, Cary et al. 2006). Even forest stand-level models rarely consider understory components other than seedlings, saplings, and downed wood (Pacala et al. 1993, He and Mladenoff 1999, Gratzer et al. 2004), except in special cases such as the need for estimating surface fuels for fire modeling (Rebain 2006).

The Rocky Mountain Research Station, Forest Health Management, Rocky Mountain National Park, Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest, and the Medicine Bow NF are coordinating efforts to conserve limber pine along the Front Range of the southern Rockies. Mountain pine beetle (MPB) populations are increasing dramatically in the area and killing limber pines in their path. Last year alone, aerial survey recorded 38,000 acres of limber pine mortality in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming, a large increase over the 9,000 acres recorded in 2006. It is estimated that MPBs will infest nearly all the...

The feedbacks between the water and the carbon cycles are of critical importance to global carbon balances. Forests and forest soils in northern latitudes are important carbon pools because of their potential as sinks for atmospheric carbon. However there are significant unknowns related to the effects of hydrologic variability, mountainous terrain, and landscape heterogeneity in controlling soil carbon dioxide (CO2) efflux. Mountainous terrain imposes large spatial heterogeneity in the biophysical controls of soil CO2 production and efflux, including soil temperature, soil water content,...

Soil CO2 efflux is a large respiratory flux from terrestrial ecosystems and a critical component of the global carbon (C) cycle. Lack of process understanding of the spatiotemporal controls on soil CO2 efflux limits our ability to extrapolate from fluxes measured at point scales to scales useful for corroboration with other ecosystem level measures of C exchange. Additional complications are introduced by the effects of soil water content seasonality and rainfall on the performance of measurement techniques. In this paper we present measurements of soil CO2 efflux made at two contrasting...

In Montana and much of the Rocky Mountain West, the single most important parameter in forecasting the controls on regional water resources is snowpack. Despite the heightened importance of snowpack, few studies have considered the representation of uncertainty in coupled snowmelt/hydrologic conceptual models. Uncertainty estimation provides a direct interpretation of the risk associated with predictive modeling results. Bayesian inference, through the application of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, provides a statistical means of approximating uncertainty associated with both the...

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) has been applied successfully in temperate environments but little is known about its performance in the snow-dominated, forested, mountainous watersheds that provide much of the water supply in western North America. To address this knowledge gap, we configured SWAT to simulate the streamflow of Tenderfoot Creek (TCSWAT). Located in central Montana, TCSWAT represents a high-elevation watershed with _85% coniferous forest cover where more than 70% of the annual precipitation falls as snow, and runoff comes primarily from spring snowmelt. Model...

We examined the distribution of adult Buprestidae and Cerambycidae in the Tenderfoot Creek Experimental Forest in the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana, U.S.A., using pan traps and sweep samples on differnt species of flowering plants. Using several methods during multi-year (2001-2004), summer-long surveys, we documented the presence of adults of three species of Buprestidae and ten Cerambycidae. Pan traps were placed along transects within meadows, unlogged lodgepole pine forests, and in differentially-logged plots initially logged in 1999-2000 and managed by the U.S. Forest...