Treesearch

Accurate identification of whitebark and limber pine has become increasingly important following the 2022 listing of whitebark pine as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. However, morphological similarities make identification of the two species difficult where ranges overlap. Using a genetic test that differentiates whitebark and limber pine, we compared field identification by Forest Inventory and Analysis field crews with genetic identification for needle samples from 371 trees. Field identifications were 100% correct for the 76 samples collected from outside regions...

Wildfires, and the sediment-rich floods that commonly follow, increasingly threaten riverine ecosystems and water infrastructure. Suspended sediment exported throughout fire–flood sequences poses particular risks due to rapid transit times and direct impacts on water quality. However, opportunities to measure suspended-sediment transport during and after post-fire floods, and therefore to illuminate what controls the magnitude and timing of suspended-sediment export from burned, flooded watersheds, are rare. A ~ 100-year flood that occurred one year into a three-year study monitoring...

Identifying dormancy traits is important for predicting insect population success, particularly in a changing climate that could disrupt evolved traits. The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) is native to North America, is responsible for millions of acres of tree mortality, and is expanding northward in Canada. Research has identified thermal traits important to epidemic-phase ecology that vary among populations. Genomic research identified 3 mountain pine beetle haplogroups representing Pleistocene glacial refugia. Significant variation in generation timing aligning...

Insects live in a wide range of thermal environments and have evolved species- and location-specific physiological processes for survival in hot and cold extremes. Thermally driven dormancy strategies, development rates and thresholds are important for synchronizing cohorts within a population and to local climates and often vary among populations within a species. Mountain pine beetle (MPB), Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins (Coleoptera: Curculionidae, Scolytinae), is a widely distributed forest insect native to North America with clinal genetic differentiation in thermally dependent...

Fire exclusion is a key factor driving conifer expansion into temperate semi-arid grasslands. However, it remains unclear how reintroducing fire affects the aboveground storage of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) in the expanding tree species and below-ground in soils. To assess the impacts of fire reintroduction C and N pools and fluxes in areas of conifer expansion we targeted a region of the Northern Great Plains that has experienced extensive woody plant expansion (WPE) of two species: ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and juniper (Juniperus spp). We quantified tree mortality of both species...

1. Naturally treeless ecosystems are being replaced by native and non-native trees worldwide, often through deliberate afforestation using forestry tree species. By introducing species having novel traits, such as relatively rapid growth, many afforestation efforts also produce numerous changes in ecosystems, at the landscape scale.2. Trees are considered critical for climate change mitigation; indeed, many current carbon sequestration strategies rely on trees. Planting trees or allowing trees to naturally colonize through range expansions can be seen as an ideal way to increase atmospheric...

Prioritizing investments in restoration, risk reduction, and conservation programs is an important part of the planning process to develop strategies for a wide range of resource management issues in the US and elsewhere (Ball et al., 2009; Noss et al., 2009; Kukkala and Moilanen, 2013; Chazdon and Guariguata, 2018; Pohjanmies et al., 2019; Strassburg et al., 2020; Duchardt et al., 2021). Prioritization systems have been developed for application at a range of scales, and typically involve multiple objectives and various schemes for optimization and tradeoff analyses (Noss et al., 2009)....

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with RGB, multispectral, or thermal cameras have demonstrated their potential to provide high-resolution data before, during, and after wildfires and prescribed burns. Pre-burn point clouds generated through the photogrammetric processing of UAV images contain geometrical and spectral information of vegetation, while active fire imagery allows for deriving fire behavior metrics. This paper focuses on characterizing the relationship between the fire rate of spread (RoS) in prescribed burns and a set of independent geometrical, spectral, and neighborho...

Climate change is altering fire regimes and post-fire conditions, contributing to relatively rapid transformation of landscapes across the western US. Studies are increasingly documenting post-fire vegetation transitions, particularly from forest to non-forest conditions or from sagebrush to invasive annual grasses. The prevalence of climate-driven, post-fire vegetation transitions is likely to increase in the future with major impacts on social–ecological systems. However, research and management communities have only recently focused attention on this emerging climate risk, and many...