Treesearch

Fire modeling is a key prescribed fire planning tool, but there are limited operational tools for integrating models of forest change and fire behavior.We sought to integrate a forest succession model, LANDIS-II, with a fire behavior model, QUIC-Fire, into a workflow for assessing fire behavior in projected future fuel conditions.Using aboveground biomass, we matched LANDIS-II data to cohorts of trees in Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data by predicting tree age using Random Forest modeling. We then used tree attributes from FIA to create three-dimensional QUIC-Fire inputs representing...

Energy exchange in the fire environment is highly influenced by the heterogeneous and dynamic coupling between the atmosphere, fire, and fuels. While it has long been known that radiation and convection are the dominant heat transfer mechanisms in wildfire spread, much is unknown about their relative contribution. This is largely due to significant challenges observing these processes in the extreme wildfire environment. We describe a low cost, easy to deploy, simple heat transfer sensor and associated model, which was developed to measure heat transfer in wildfire. The sensor consists of...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Arkansas. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all...

Old-growth forests in the Southeast are diverse, highly valued, and complicated to both define and differentiate on the landscape. In this report, we review the history of forests in the region, including how old-growth has been defined, the characteristics of old-growth communities and old trees, and the values that old-growth communities provide. We also provide information for land managers to consider: threats that old-growth forests face, examples of management strategies for maintaining and restoring ecological functions, and tools for managing old-growth characteristics in mature...

Wildfire simultaneously disrupts ecosystem carbon, water, and soil processes, yet these coupled effects and postfire recovery trajectories cannot be reliably assessed from spectral vegetation indices alone. Here, we developed a fine-scale, multi-dimensional framework to quantify wildfire impacts and post-fire ecohydrological recovery, using the 2016 megafire in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the eastern United States as a testbed. This framework integrated gap-filled 30 m NASA Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 surface reflectance with an expanded diagnostic ecosystem model (Coupled...

In the eastern United States, feeding by introduced predators Laricobius nigrinus Fender and Laricobius osakensis Shiyake and Montgomery are likely insufficient to sustainably regulate the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), Adelges tsugae Annand, due to adelgid population rebound postpredation. This suggests that additional predators may be needed in eastern North America to achieve effective biological control. In the Pacific Northwest, there is evidence that multiple specialist predators, including La. nigrinus, Leucotaraxis piniperda (Malloch), and Le. argenticollis (Zetterstedt)...

This resource bulletin describes the principal findings of the 2019 forest inventory of Oklahoma (conducted January 13, 2010 to July 6, 2021)—the first report on a complete, annualized inventory of central and western Oklahoma, and changes since the previous report, Oklahoma’s Forests, 2014. The survey finds nearly 12 million acres in Oklahoma are forest land, mostly in private ownership. These forest lands contain more than 5 billion trees, 10 billion cubic feet of wood, and 250 million short tons of biomass. Net change in volume was positive, with an increase of 93.9 million cubic feet.

Traditional empirical fire danger rating systems are largely based on generalized historical weather-fire relationships. By contrast, fire behavior models incorporate interactions among weather, fuels and topography to simulate fire spread across landscapes, offering opportunities for wildfire danger evaluation.This study is to develop a novel Wildfire Danger Assessment and Forecast (WDAF) framework that estimates daily fire spread potential using spatially explicit fire simulations.The framework integrates weather, fuel and topographic data into a fire behavior model to simulate daily...

This report provides detailed estimates and highlights key findings from Forest Inventory and Analysis data collected across the State of Mississippi from 2017 to 2023; a remeasurement of plots sampled between 2006 and 2017. Estimates of forest area, volume, biomass, and timber product output are provided across land ownerships, forest types, and forest demographics throughout the State. Mississippi covers approximately 31 million acres, 19.2 million acres (62 percent) of which is considered forest land. This report evaluates trends in land-use change as well as current forest land...

The invasive hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae Annand) continues to threaten the survival of eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carr.) and Carolina hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana Engelm.) in eastern North America. Effective restoration efforts will require an integrated understanding of how these species respond to management interventions under current environmental pressures. This study examined the early growth, survival, and pest resilience of eastern and Carolina hemlock seedlings planted under varying competition control, insecticide treatment, and light availability regimes....