Treesearch

Increasing terrestrial carbon storage can reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as a climate mitigation strategy. Agricultural soil offers potential for persistent soil carbon sequestration. Mineral-associated organic carbon (MAOC) is generally more persistent than particulate organic carbon (POC), but it is unclear how much influence soil health and management can have on MAOC relative to climate and edaphic conditions. Soil samples from 196 agricultural fields on 77 farms throughout Vermont were fractionated by size to understand how these factors affect the amount and proportions of...

Canada’s forest sector must maintain wood supply, carbon storage, biodiversity, and social values as climate change and other global stressors increase the risk of disturbance and threaten forest resilience. Climate-Smart Forestry (CSF) offers an important framework for integrating adaptation, mitigation, and socio-economic objectives, but practitioners often lack spatial decision support tools that connect stand-level actions to landscape-scale resilience under uncertain future conditions. We introduce DIVERSE, a pan-Canadian research partnership working across 22 managed-forest landscapes...

It is widely perceived that wildfire activity has increased across the western United States (WUS), with studies generally focusing on large wildfires. This study examines changes in the number of wildfire ignitions and burned area in the WUS using a comprehensive record of more than 750 000 wildfire incidents from 1992 to 2020 across biophysical gradients, seasons, and ignition causes. It further analyzes the environmental conditions associated with elevated fire activity. Our analysis comparing the periods 1992–2006 and 2007–2020 indicates that the annual number of recorded wildfires...

Place attachment provides a useful lens for understanding relationships with environments, highlighting how experiences, histories, social ties, and functional dependencies bond individuals with place. Disasters, however, threaten place, along with the social networks that provide support and reinforce ties to place. Here, we examine how dimensions of place attachment manifested in narratives about housing recovery after wildfires across northern California. Relying on 69 photo elicitation interviews with survivors that lost their primary homes to wildfire, we find that place identity,...

Birds need our help, and you can make important contributions to their conservation. In this publication, we describe bird species of conservation concern in Missouri and explain how forestry practices can be used to benefit birds. The guidelines presented here can be applied whether your primary objective is to create habitat for bird species of concern, or to manage forests for forest products while incorporating bird conservation as a complementary objective. We present practices that support both bird conservation and the long-term sustainability and productivity of forest resources.

Wildfire extent is growing in the United States (US), a fact attributable to increasingly favorable weather and climatic conditions and the net result of human interventions. US federal land management agencies act upon the wildfire threat by managing hazardous fuels, discouraging human‐caused ignitions, and suppressing active fires. Costs of these actions are rising, so policy makers and wildland managers seek information that can help them understand the trade‐offs of resource allocations. This study generates new information about potential future wildfire and suppression demands by...

Historically, models and systems for fuels management have been developed independently without a great deal of coordination, leading to varying degrees of overlapping functionality. Additionally, as Gail Wells noted in the December 2009 issue of Fire Science Digest, the onus of reviewing, selecting, and using a specific tool often falls on the fire manager. To increase efficiency, reduce redundancies, and make the tool-selection process easier for fire managers, a solution was needed that incorporated several fuels management tools in one framework. The Joint Fire Science Program, a...

Managing ecosystems in an era of rapid change is inherently challenging not only because of uncertainty in future climate but also due to diverse responses of ecosystems to climate. Projections of ecological transformation alongside information about plausible vegetation trajectories can help land managers explore divergent scenarios and consider how modeled outcomes match their observations. Climate‐analog impact models (AIMs) compare environmental information (e.g., vegetation types) between sets of climatically similar locations to infer change and can be used to identify multiple...

Wildfire activity in the Southeastern United States is shaped by unique ecological and climatic conditions that differ markedly from those in other regions of the country. Despite increasing recognition of fire’s ecological importance and rising risks under climate change, regional-scale projections of wildfire behavior in the Southeast remain limited. In this study, we applied the Large Fire Simulator (FSim), a stochastic, spatially explicit fire behavior model, to simulate ignition, spread, suppression, and containment of wildfires within a Florida flatwoods pyrome under both historical...

Forests can affect stream structure and function, but evaluations linking freshwater biodiversity to watershed-scale forest-stand conditions are limited. We evaluated competing hypotheses about spatial patterns of freshwater biodiversity by combining species inventories of vertebrates and invertebrates from traditional and environmental DNA (eDNA) methods across 24 temperate watersheds of young to old forests (37 to 124 y old). Freshwater taxonomic and functional richness of invertebrates were, on average, 1.2-fold and 1.5-fold higher, respectively, in older forests (>75 y) than in younger...