Treesearch

BEMRP's participation in the Bitterroot National Forest's proposed Trapper Bunkhouse Land Stewardship Project (Trapper-Bunkhouse Project) consists of two parts. One is the field study mentioned elsewhere in this ECO-Report that is looking into the effects of thinning and burning on various resources. The other part involves modeling to determine where treatments should take place both from a fuel reduction and economic standpoint.

This tutorial demonstrates the application of piecewise regression to bedload data to define a shift in phase of transport so that the reader may perform similar analyses on available data. The use of piecewise regression analysis implicitly recognizes different functions fit to bedload data over varying ranges of flow. The transition from primarily low rates of sand transport (Phase I) to higher rates of sand and coarse gravel transport (Phase II) is termed "breakpoint" and is defined as the flow where the fitted functions intersect. The form of the model used here fits linear segments to...

Wildland fuels have been accumulating in the United States during at least the past half-century due to wildland fire management practices and policies. The additional fuels contribute to intense fire behavior, increase the costs of wildland fire control, and contribute to the degradation of local and regional air quality. The management of prescribed and wildland fire on Federal, State, and private lands pose critical challenges for the characterization of preburn fire fuels and postburn carbon consumption assessments, predicting smoke trajectories and concentrations, and modeling air...

The BlueSky Smoke Prediction System developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, AirFire Team under the National Fire Plan is a modeling framework that integrates tools, knowledge of fuels, moisture, combustion, emissions, plume dynamics, and weather to produce real-time predictions of the cumulative impacts of smoke from wildfires, prescribed fires, and agricultural burn activities. Currently, BlueSky smoke predictions are available daily across the contiguous United States. The output has been used by air regulators, burn bosses, and smoke managers as a guide to help...

Forest managers must understand how changes in soil quality resulting from project implementation affect long-term productivity and watershed health. Volcanic ash soils have unique properties that affect their quality and function; and which may warrant soil quality standards and assessment techniques that are different from other soils. We discuss the concept of soil quality and how it may be altered by activity-induced soil disturbances. A practical application of the use of soil disturbance categories and physical soil indices used to perform operational soil monitoring on an ash cap...

To enable the resolution of deep phylogenetic divergence in Scolytinae and closely related weevils, several new molecular markers were screened for their phylogenetic potential. The nuclear protein encoding genes, CAD and Arginine Kinase, were particularly promising and will be added to future phylogenetic studies in combination with 28S, COI, and Elongation Factor 1α. The combined analysis of multiple molecular markers and wide taxon sampling is expected to resolve many previously unresolved nodes in scolytine phylogeny, but a completely resolved topology seems dependent on the inclusion...

The extreme cost of fighting wildland fires has brought fire suppression expenditures to the forefront of budgetary and policy debate in the United States. Inasmuch as large fires are responsible for the bulk of fire suppression expenditures, understanding fire characteristics that influence expenditures is important for both strategic fire planning and onsite fire management decisions. These characteristics then can be used to produce estimates of suppression expenditures for large wildland fires for use in wildland fire decision support or after-fire reviews. The primary objective of...

Old-growth ponderosa pine and western larch forests that developed as a result of frequent, low-intensity fires were once extensive in the Inland West, but now are rare due to historical logging and, more recently, severe wildfires. In response to missing several natural fire cycles, remaining stands of old trees are at increasingly greater risk from uncharacteristically high severity wildfire and insect and disease impacts. Fire suppression activities over almost a century have allowed dense ingrowth of mostly shade-tolerant species. In turn, this increased stand density creates ladder...

Identification of insect species is often problematic because of limited morphological and/or biological characters. DNA data have been used in many phylogenetic studies to help identify and revise species boundaries (Savolainen and others 2005). For many studies, percent similarity DNA compared between species was summarized and intra- and interspecific variation patterns were observed (for example, Brower and Boyce 1991). These patterns suggested that animal species, at most, exhibit 2.0 percent difference among conspecifics (Hebert and others 2004). A group of individuals that exhibited...

Wildland fire managers need better estimates of fuel loading so they can accurately predict potential fire behavior and effects of alternative fuel and ecosystem restoration treatments. This report presents the development and evaluation of a new fuel sampling method, called the photoload sampling technique, to quickly and accurately estimate loadings for six common surface fuel components using downward looking and oblique photographs depicting a sequence of graduated fuel loadings of synthetic fuelbeds. This report details the methods used to construct the photoload sequences (series of...