Treesearch

In the dry, fire-adapted forests of California’s Sierra Nevada - where yellow pine, mixed conifer, and red fir historically burned on frequent, low-to-moderate severity cycles - restoring historical fire regimes has been a guiding principle for ecological management. But most contemporary forests in this region are far from that benchmark. Instead, these forests have been shaped by decades of fire suppression, and increasingly, by megafires at the opposite extreme.

Climate change is contributing to unprecedented rates of ecological transformation worldwide. Shifts in species composition and habitat have implications for ecosystem function and human relationships. The 1964 Wilderness Act was passed to preserve undeveloped large landscapes in their “natural” condition and for the continued use and enjoyment of people. Nevertheless, wilderness is still vulnerable to the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. Using active management to respond to climate change challenges in wilderness is complicated by the very protections afforded to wilderness...

For 25 years, ranchers in South Dakota have used the South Dakota Drought Tool to estimate forage productivity of grazing lands. This crucial information helps them gauge whether to increase or decrease their herd size the following year. Management agencies also use the South Dakota Drought Tool to determine forage productivity of the lands they manage to balance the needs of livestock and wildlife.

This report describes operational fire spread potential forecasts for the Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountain regions of the United States. We used satellite thermal detection data to estimate daily area burned from 547 wildfires that burned between 2012-2021. Using weather and soil moisture data corresponding to the day and location of each fire, we developed simple linear and logistic regression models estimating daily fire growth and potential for fire spread greater than 70 acres. These models are used to create daily prediction grids for the current date and for a 2-day forecast...

Forest managers are increasingly looking to restore ponderosa pine forests to more ecologically diverse conditions - forests with clusters of trees, openings, and multiple age classes instead of the evenly spaced, uniform stands produced by traditional forest management.

Hidden like fish eggs in the streambed, the answer was buried in the mathematical models of Morgan Spark’s graduate work. Biologists and land managers know early fish life is sensitive, and nature is difficult to predict. In the streambed, eggs and young fish can be at risk from unintentional habitat disruptions from activities such as grazing, prescribed fire, and road work. The question was how to know when wild fish are hatching and emerging to avoid those sensitive windows. A new tool, hatchR, is here to lend biologists a helping hand - or fin.

Concerns have grown over the environmental impacts of open pile burning, which has the potential to degrade air quality and harm soil. Additionally, pile burning is constrained by narrow burn windows in areas with high wildfire risk. As a result, technologies such as the CharBoss - which converts slash into biochar - are gaining attention. However, optimal deployment remains uncertain because of variability in performance due to pile locations, slash-pile size, and site conditions. We address this challenge with a two-stage simulation - optimization framework. First, a mixed-integer...

Forest slash piles require effective management for site preparation and fire risk reduction. While pile burning remains a common disposal method, there is growing interest in utilizing these materials for energy and other bioproducts. Slash piles can serve as temporary carbon storage, and provide wildlife habitat, but they also contribute to surface fuel loads and increase site preparation costs if not properly utilized or disposed. Managing such low-value materials distributed across large forest landscapes poses logistical and economic challenges, especially when the volume and precise...

The effectiveness of biochar for ecological restoration, toxicity remediation and carbon sequestration are fundamentally dependent on the biochar production technology. This review provides a systematic comparison of thermochemical conversion techniques such as pyrolysis (slow, rotary kiln, auger-based), gasification (downdraft and fluidized bed) and hydrothermal carbonization (HTC). Key performance metrics such as temperature profile, residence time, emissions regulation, and scalability are evaluated alongside critical biochar qualities such as surface area, porosity, fixed carbon...

Global change is enriching terrestrial ecosystems with multiple nutrients and amplifying interannual variation in precipitation. Grassland productivity may be co-limited by combinations of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K). How these nutrients may interact with each other or with varying precipitation to influence the contributions of dominant species and functional groups to aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) and species diversity is rarely considered. We fertilized a mesic grassland for 5 years with all combinations of N, P, and K+ micronutrients in the first year...