Treesearch

Bigflower agoseris occurs in locations west of central Utah. It occurs in southern British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Montana, and is most common in those states bordering the Pacific Ocean (Baird 2006). Variety grandiflora is most common east of the Cascade Mountains and southward on both the east and west side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to southern California (Fig. 1). Variety leptophylla is most common west of the Cascade Mountains from Vancouver Island through Puget Sound and the Willamette Valley to the Siskiyou-Klamath Mountains of southwest...

Our recent contribution to Global Change Biology found that, globally, two-thirds of protected area units and over half of protected land area are unlikely to serve as steppingstones for many species under a warming climate (Parks et al., 2023). In response, Gillingham and Thomas (2023) point to previous evidence that protected areas have acted as steppingstones based on three studies from Great Britain that examined range shifts.Original publication: Parks, Sean A.; Holsinger, Lisa M.; Abatzoglou, John T.; Littlefield, Caitlin E.; Zeller, Katherine A. 2023. Protected areas not likely to...

Millions of acres of public and private land in the United States are at risk of losing the native plant communities that are central to the integrity of ecosystems. As plant communities decline, the biodiversity they embody is also being rapidly lost, along with a wealth of ecosystem goods and services important to society. There is a long and growing list of threats to plant communities-invasive species, overgrazing, climate change, and altered fire regimes, to name a few, that have collectively accelerated the deterioration of natural landscapes across the country.

Healthy forests are critically important for mitigating the effects of climate change, reducing biodiversity loss, and protecting our water resources. Decades of chronic underfunding combined with the worsening impacts of climate change and wildfire have increased the need for reforestation across the Western United States. This article highlights the challenges impacting tree-seed availability and suggests opportunities for strengthening the tree-seed supply chain to meet reforestation goals in an era of climate change. This paper was presented at The Reforestation Pipeline in the Western...

Within the global water cycle, the groundwater pool represents a substantial volume of water, containing approximately 8,000-23,000•103 km3 (Abbott et al., 2019). Annual groundwater discharge to the ocean (0.1e6.5•103 km3/year) is two to three orders of magnitude smaller than oceanic evaporation (350e510•103 km3/year), which initiates the continental part of the water cycle through atmospheric condensation and landward precipitation (88e120•103 km3/year). The other segments of the water cycle are part of our daily life: the clouds in the sky, the polar ice seen from satellites and the...

The importance of interactions among stream hydrology, morphology, and biology is well recognized in studies of stream ecosystems. However, when quantifying the impacts of altered flow on aquatic habitat, results are often based either on combined changes in topography and flow, or with altered flow over static topography. Here, we study the potential beneficial effects of restoring unregulated flows on salmonid habitat and separate the relative influences of changes in flow vs. topography. We hypothesize that flow restoration will increase topographic complexity and that the coevolution...

Riverine water flows both above the streambed and within the porous sediment surrounding rivers (Nagaoka and Ohgaki, 1990; Mendoza and Zhou, 1992), ubiquitously entering and exiting the permeable streambed and banks as the flow moves downstream (Boano et al., 2014). This interstitial movement of riverine water is called hyporheic flow and forms a saturated volume of sediment surrounding alluvial rivers that is termed the hyporheic zone (Fig. 3.1A) (Gooseff, 2010). The extent of the hyporheic zone can be defined through biological, geochemical, or hydraulic means and is a transitional area...

Successful establishment of Pinus ponderosa seedlings in the southwestern United States is often limited by stressful and harsh site conditions related to drought severity and severe disturbances such as wildfire and mining operations. Seedling quality has an important influence on outplanting performance, but nursery practices that typically employ optimal growing environments may also be limiting seedling morphological and physiological performance on stressful outplanting sites. To address this, a study was established to test alterations in seedling characteristics subjected to...

Context In western US forests, the increasing frequency of large high-severity fires presents challenges for society. Quantifying how fuel conditions influence high-severity area is important for managing risks of large high-severity fires and understanding how they are changing with climate change. Fuel availability and heterogeneity influence high-severity fire probability, but heterogeneity is insensitive to some aspects of forest connectivity that are important to potential high-severity fire transmission and thus high-severity area. Objectives To quantify the effects of fuel availabili...

Nutria (Myocastor coypus) is a semiaquatic rodent species that is invasive across multiple regions within the United States. Here, we evaluated a qPCR assay previously described for use in Japan for application across invasive populations in the United States. We also compared two environmental DNA sampling methodologies for this assay: field filtration of large volumes of water passed through filters versus direct sampling of small volumes of water. We validated assay specificity, generality, and sensitivity, compared assay performance between two independent laboratories, and successfully...