Treesearch

The Savannah River Site is a Department of Energy Nuclear Defense Facility and a National Environmental Research Park located in the upper coastal plain of South Carolina. Prescribed burning is conducted on 15,000 to 20,000 ac annually. We modified standard forest inventory methods to incorporate a complete assessment of fuel components on 622 plots, assessing coarse woody debris, ladder fuels, and the litter and duff layers. Because of deficiencies in south-wide data on litter-duff bulk densities, which are the fuels most often consumed in prescribed fires, we developed new bulk density...

Isolated wilderness ecosystems with a history of frequent, low-severity fires have been altered due to many decades of fire exclusion and, as a result, are difficult to restore for philosophical and logistical reasons. In this paper, we describe the successional conditions of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) communities along the South Fork of the Flathead River in the Bob Marshall Wilderness following decades of fire suppression, and then summarize the first-year effects of the 2003 fires on these communities. We found that at least 34 percent of the large ponderosa pine trees were dead...

Although funnel traps are routinely used to manage bark beetles, little is known regarding the relationship between trap captures of spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis Kirby) and mortality of Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii Parry ex Engelm.) within a 10 ha block of the trap. Using recursive partitioning tree analyses, rules were developed for predicting spruce mortality and associated levels of beetle population phase (endemic and epidemic), in the current year and subsequent year, for a given level of trap captures. Although model predictions of infested-stem counts had large...

We welcome the opportunity to respond to the comments of our colleagues, Fridley et al. (2006), on our recent paper (Stohlgren et al. 2005) regarding plant species invasions along latitudinal gradients. We agree on many aspects of this important line of research. In fact, the two major findings that they report from their analysis of floras are consistent with our main points: (1) that latitude explains very little of variation in native species richness in the conterminous United States; and (2) that native plant species richness is one of the strongest predictors of nonnative species...

The Government of Canada believes that a healthy democracy requires the active engagement of its citizens in understanding the economic, social, and environmental issues faced by the nation. In the Atlantic Region, Environment Canada has been actively working, for more than a decade, on helping citizens achieve this integrated view and providing local communities with the means to develop their own visions of sustainability. In this regard, the Atlantic Coastal Action Program (ACAP) has been one of Environment Canada Atlantic Region’s greatest success stories. ACAP is a community-based...

Current wildland fire policy calls for citizen involvement in planning and management. To be effective in their efforts to engage outside stakeholders, resource professionals need to understand citizens’ understanding and attitudes toward current practices as well as how to best communicate about proposed actions. A variety of outreach methods have been used to communicate the rationale behind fuel reduction techniques. Limited evaluation of these efforts has occurred resulting in a lack of information available to guide the outreach decisions of agency personnel. This paper evaluates the...

This paper introduces a background discussion of the importance of sustainability in the 21st century, the issues surrounding how we learn, the role of science, and the importance of interdisciplinarity with respect to ecological and socio-economic sustainability. Furthermore, background information is provided about the history and origins of the American public, land-grant university together with a discussion of a few of the opportunities and challenges that it faces with respect to its role as an engine to achieve sustainability.

The understanding of historic hydroclimatic variability is basic to plan for a proper management of limited water resources in northern Mexico. The objective of this study was to develop a network of tree-ring chronologies for climate reconstruction and to analyze the influence of circulatory patterns, such as ENSO. Climatic sensitive treering chronologies were developed in mountain ranges of the Sierras Madre Oriental and Occidental. A grid of new Douglas-fir chronologies were developed and winter-spring precipitation reconstructions were produced for northwest Chihuahua, northwestern...

Canada’s Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Environment Canada (Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Network) are developing an aquatic macroinvertebrate biomonitoring network for Ontario’s lakes, streams, and wetlands. We are building the program, called the Ontario Benthos Biomonitoring Network (OBBN), on the principles of partnership, free data sharing, and standardization. This paper discusses the importance of biomonitoring, describes why benthos are commonly used as indicators of aquatic ecosystem condition, explains the complementarity of biological and chemical assessments,...

For the past two years, three rural municipalities in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies have been working together to promote sustainability in their communities. The towns share the belief that water is an integral part of the community; they have formed a Tri Community Watershed Initiative to help manage their shared resource. Activities of the Initiative include changing municipal policies, writing municipal water, and river valley management plans, working with partners, hosting community events and engaging local media in community success stories. The towns are also assisting...