Treesearch

This report and associated web site files provide sediment transport and related data for coarse-bed streams and rivers to potential users. Information on bedload and suspended sediment transport, streamflow, channel geometry, channel bed material, floodplain material, and large particle transport is provided for 33 study reaches in Idaho that represent a wide range of drainage areas, average annual streamflows, channel gradients, and substrate sizes. All the study reaches have a coarser layer of surface bed material overlaying finer subsurface material. Both bedload and suspended sediment...

Forest fires may induce changes in soil organic properties that often lead to water repellent conditions within the soil profile that decrease soil infiltration capacity. The remote detection of water repellent soils after forest fires would lead to quicker and more accurate assessment of erosion potential. An airborne hyperspectral image was acquired over the Hayman Fire in the summer of 2002. A supervised classification was performed in an attempt to identify soils that were highly water repellent. The classification was not accurate in determining water repellency severity, but it was...

Fire suppression has reduced acres burned to an average of 2 million acres a year. An unfortunate result of this has been the accumulation of even more above-normal fuel loads in many areas. This paper discusses (1) the important ecological role of fire, (2) using fire as a fuels treatment, and (2) the benefits and risks of fire.Other publications in this series

Effective public education and communication campaigns about wildland fire and fuels management should have clear objectives, and use the right techniques to achieve these objectives. This fact sheet lists seven important considerations for planning or implementing a hazard communication effort.Other publications in this series

There are many reasons to want to know the true surface area of the landscape, especially in landscape analysis and studies of wildlife habitat. Surface area provides a better estimate of the land area available to an animal than planimetric area, and the ratio of this surface area to planimetric area provides a useful measure of topographic roughness of the landscape. This paper describes a straightforward method of calculating surface-area grids directly from digital elevation models (DEMs), by generating 8 3-dimensional triangles connecting each cell centerpoint with the centerpoints of...

Looking Glass Rock is a large, exposed granite pluton that is a special place for recreation and wildlife in the Pisgah National Forest. Even-aged timber stands surrounding the base of the rock originated in 1916 from clearcutting of the original mixed-species virgin stands. Two species now account for 86 percent of the 211 ft2 of stand basal area per acre: overstory yellow-poplar (81 percent) and midstory silverbell (5 percent). Timber management is not a current option in this area. If options change, however, research results suggest several techniques for managing and regenerating this...

This chapter encompasses the lands of the Southwest as defined by Region 3 of the USDA Forest Service (USFS): Arizona, New Mexico, and portions of western Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. I examine human use and modification of the grasslands/rangelands of this region, with an emphasis on those areas managed by the Forest Service. Because the majority of publications serving as sources for this chapter use both "rangelands" and "grasslands" when referring to a variety of different grassland and rangeland vegetation types, this section does not distinguish between the terms. An exhaustive...

In 2000, the Jasper fire in the Black Hills, SD, created a mosaic of burned and unburned patches of different sizes within the contiguous ponderosa pine forest. To study the spatial regeneration of ponderosa pine seedlings and the ecological gradients existing between burned and unburned areas two years after fire, we used a transect approach. We demonstrated that seedling establishment was prolific within the peripheral part of the burned areas due to the presence of seed sources close by, the seedbed conditions, and the relatively low competitive pressure. This transect study provides...

This report is volume 1 of an ecological assessment of grassland ecosystems in the Southwestern United States, and it is one of a series of planned publications addressing major ecosystems of the Southwest. The first assessment, General Technical Report RM-GTR- 295, An Assessment of Forest Ecosystem Health in the Southwest (by Dahms and Geils, technical editors, published July 1997), covered forested ecosystems. Given the complexities of grassland ecology and the increasing number of challenges facing grassland managers, the USDA Forest Service Southwestern Region, in partnership with the...

This chapter establishes a general framework for describing the various kinds of grasslands outlined in subsequent chapters. This framework outlines the major categories or classes of grasslands that occur as part of Southwestern terrestrial ecosystems within National Forest System lands and provides an ecological and environmental context in regards to how they differ in their floristic, geographic, spatial, and climatic settings. More detailed information about these grassland systems is also presented in chapter 6.Individual papers from this publication