Treesearch

Predation is an important species interaction to monitor when assessing an invasive species’ impact on a particular ecosystem, but it can be difficult to observe and thus, fully understand. On Kaua’i island, invasive Barn Owls (Tyto alba) predate native seabirds, but difficult terrain in this region and the cryptic nature of owl predation make traditional monitoring of predation quite challenging. Using Barn Owls collected as part of removal efforts on Kaua’i and Lehua islands, we conducted DNA metabarcoding of owl digestive tracts to detect and determine seabird species they predate. We...

Landscape-scale forest restoration aims to restore ecological structure and function and provide habitat for wildlife. However, forest management likely has varying impacts across wildlife life stages, with consequences for population persistence. Using 10 years of nest (n = 294) survey data for a focal bird species, white-headed woodpecker (Dryobates albolarvatus), we assessed how forest management (tree removal and prescribed burning) at two spatial scales (stand [2.25 ha] and landscape [314 ha]), forest vegetation variables at three spatial scales (nest tree, local [0.4 ha], and...

Environmental justice is an important component of sustainable tourism, but stakeholder perspectives related to environmental justice may vary. Using Q-methodology, we investigated different stakeholder perceptions related to environmental justice within the context of tourism and ecological restoration. Specifically, in the Erhai Lake basin, China, we explore perspectives around an ecological restoration effort that included the government mandated closure of 1900 establishments (inns and restaurants) in response to environmental degradation. We identify and explore four environmental...

Global commitments to mitigating climate change and halting biodiversity loss require reliable information about Earth’s ecosystems. Increasingly, such information is obtained from multiple sources of remotely sensed data combined with data acquired in the field. This new wealth of data poses challenges regarding the combination of different data sources to derive the required information and assess uncertainties. In this article, we show how predictors and their variances can be derived when hierarchically nested models are applied. Previous studies have developed methods for cases...

This research applies a temporally and spatially explicit model to analyze timber harvesting’s impact on campground utilization on United States Forest Service (USFS) land across the Western U.S. Timber harvesting and camping can occur near one another due to multiple-use management strategies used by the USFS. However, intensive forest management can change the degree of perceived naturalness of a forest and may therefore negatively impact recreation. We investigate several facets of harvesting activity, such as proximity to camping, type of harvesting, regional differences, and persisting...

Understanding wildfire behavior requires knowledge of how physical processes interact with fuels, topography, and weather and can be hard to approach or explain for those without a background in engineering or physical sciences. A greater familiarity with the physics of fire behavior translates to not only a better-prepared fire management workforce but also improved fire behavior prediction models. Both are critical for developing proactive approaches to managing wildfires and using fire itself as a stewardship tool.A new book, Wildland Fire Behaviour: Dynamics, Principles, and Processes,...

Wildfires can serve as both threats and opportunities, depending on one’s perspective. For people who live in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where human development and natural vegetation intersect, wildfires pose an evident danger to lives and property. Conversely, for natural resource managers on Federal lands, wildfires present an opportunity to maintain or restore ecosystem health. The key to striking a balance between fire as a threat and as an opportunity lies in effective fuel management strategies.

The Canada lynx is listed as a threatened species, and as such, the identification and conservation of lynx habitats is of significant concern. Lynxes require areas with high amounts of horizontal cover made up of ground vegetation. Lidar offers a robust method of quantifying vegetation structure, and airborne lidar has been acquired across large areas of potential lynx habitat. Unfortunately, airborne lidar is often not able to directly measure understory horizontal cover due to occlusion from the upper branches. Terrestrial lidar does directly measure understory horizontal cover and can...

Barriers such as hydroelectric dams inhibit migratory pathways essential to many aquatic species, resulting in significant losses of species, their unique life-history forms, and genetic diversity. Understanding the impacts of dam removal to species recovery at these different biological levels is crucial to fully understand the restoration response. We used the removal of two large dams on the Elwha River as an opportunity to characterize how restored connectivity impacts the reestablishment of two fish species, Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and Steelhead/rainbow trout...

Fire is a pervasive driver of trait evolution in animals and its importance may be magnified as fire regimes rapidly change in the coming decades. This was the thesis of our paper published recently in Trends in Ecology and Evolution [1]. In their response letter, Nimmo et al. [2] reinforce our thesis and suggest expansion of some of our conceptual models.