Treesearch

Background: Contemporary and projected shifts in global fire regimes highlight the importance of understanding how fire affects ecosystem function and biodiversity across taxa and geographies. Pyrodiversity, or heterogeneity in fire history, is often an important driver of biodiversity, though it has been largely overlooked until relatively recently. In this paper, we synthesise previous research to develop a theoretical framework on pyrodiversity–biodiversity relationships and propose future research and conservation management directions.Theoretical Framework: Pyrodiversity may affect...

1. Ecological restoration is beneficial to ecological communities in this era of largescale landscape change and ecological disruption. However, restoration outcomes are notoriously variable, which makes fine-scale decision-making challenging. This is true for restoration efforts that follow large fires, which are increasingly common as the climate changes.2. Post-fire restoration efforts, like tree planting and seeding have shown mixed success, though the causes of the variation in restoration outcomes remain unclear. Abiotic factors such as elevation and fire severity, as well as biotic...

Aim: Managers are increasingly facing an uncertain future given changing climates and ecological trajectories. The interacting effects of climate, natural disturbance, and management actions complicate future projections, and there is a need for approaches that integrate these factors - especially for predicting future vegetation and species richness. Location: Central Sierra Nevada Mountains, USA.Methods: We used outputs from a spatially explicit landscape disturbance succession model that incorporated forest management actions, disturbance, and climate to estimate habitat and potential...

The La Sal Mountains are an isolated sky island in southeast Utah. These high-altitude ecosystems are especially vulnerable to climate change and human-caused disturbances. In 2013 and 2014, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR) introduced nonnative mountain goats to the La Sals to enhance hunting and wildlife viewing opportunities. Recreation has increased in the area since then. Mountain goats and increased recreation are affecting plant species of conservation concern, suggesting that an adaptive management approach may be needed to maintain the ecosystem and the sensitive...

In the weeks following the 2022 Cedar Creek Fire, an Interagency Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) team was mobilized to identify and mitigate risks to human life and safety and critical water resources in the surrounding communities, including Oakridge, Oregon. During their assessment, the BAER team used a field guide developed by the Rocky Mountain Research Station to create a soil burn severity map and identify areas prone to elevated erosion. Their field work led to quick assessment of potential harm to water quality in Waldo Lake.

Statistical analyses of wildfire growth are rarely undertaken, particularly in South America. In this study, we describe a simple and intuitive difference equation model of wildfire growth that uses a spread parameter to control the radial speed of the modeled fire and an extinguish parameter to control the rate at which the burning perimeter becomes inactive. Using data from the GlobFire project, we estimate these two parameters for 1003 large, multi-day fires in Peru between 2001 and 2020. For four fire-prone ecoregions within Peru, a set of 24 generalized linear models are fit for each...

Climate warming, land use change, and altered fire regimes are driving ecological transformations that can have critical effects on Earth's biota. Fire refugia - locations that are burned less frequently or severely than their surroundings - may act as sites of relative stability during this period of rapid change by being resistant to fire and supporting post-fire recovery in adjacent areas. Because of their value to forest ecosystem persistence, there is an urgent need to anticipate where refugia are most likely to be found and where they align with environmental conditions that support...

Appropriately designed fuel treatments reduce negative outcomes of wildfire and in some cases promote beneficial wildfire outcomes. Wildfires are a landscape scale phenomenon; therefore, fuel treatments should be evaluated at a landscape level to maximize effectiveness. This requires shifting perspective to think of a landscape mosaic, rather than an individual site. Given the inability to treat all forests at risk from wildfire, understanding where and how fuel treatments can be most influential at the landscape scale is crucial. Scientists at the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain...

Most terrestrial plants disperse by seeds, yet the relationship between seed mass, seed dispersal traits, and plant dispersion is poorly understood. We quantified seed traits for 48 species of native and introduced plants from the grasslands of western Montana, USA, to investigate the relationships between seed traits and plant dispersion patterns. Additionally, because the linkage between dispersal traits and dispersion patterns might be stronger for actively dispersing species, we compared these patterns between native and introduced plants. Finally, we evaluated the efficacy of trait...

Understanding how habitat fragmentation affects individual species is complicated by challenges associated with quantifying species-specific habitat and spatial variability in fragmentation effects within a species’ range. We aggregated a 29-year breeding survey data set for the endangered marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) from >42,000 forest sites throughout the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, and northern California) of the United States. We built a species distribution model (SDM) in which occupied sites were linked with Landsat imagery to quantify murrelet-specific...