Treesearch

The importance of forests for sequestering carbon has created widespread interest among land managers for identifying actions that maintain or enhance carbon storage in forests. Managing for forest carbon under changing climatic conditions underscores a need for resources that help identify adaptation actions that align with carbon management. We developed the Forest Carbon Management Menu to help translate broad carbon management concepts into actionable tactics that help managers reduce risk from expected climate impacts in order to meet desired management goals. We describe examples of...

Climate change over the next century is predicted to cause widespread maladaptation in natural systems. This prediction, as well as many sustainable management and conservation practices, assumes that species are adapted to their current climate. However, this assumption is rarely tested. Using a large-scale common garden experiment combined with genome-wide sequencing, we found that valley oak (Quercus lobata), a foundational tree species in California ecosystems, showed a signature of adaptational lag to temperature, with fastest growth rates occurring at cooler temperatures than...

This report summarizes the findings of data collected as part of the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program in the State of Mississippi with data collection points from 2008 to 2017. Forest land area has declined slightly to 19.3 million acres, with the majority of diversions from forest land use to urban or agriculture land uses. Mississippi is a wood-rich State, with 37 billion cubic feet of wood volume and 2 billion tons of biomass. During the 2017 survey period, Mississippi grew more than twice what it removed on average, annually. Harvest removals averaged 865 million cubic feet...

Exposure of nontarget wildlife to anticoagulant rodenticides (AR) is a global conservation concern typically centered around urban or agricultural areas. Recently, however, the illegal use of ARs in remote forests of California, USA, has exposed sensitive predators, including the federally threatened northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina). We used congeneric barred owls (S. varia) as a sentinel species to investigate whether ARs pose a threat to spotted owls and other old-forest wildlife in northern regions of the Pacific Northwest. We analyzed the liver tissue from 40 barred...

In dealing with predicted changes in environmental conditions outside those experienced today, forest managers and researchers rely on process‐based models to inform physiological processes and predict future forest growth responses. The carbon and oxygen isotope ratios of tree‐ring cellulose (δ13Ccell, δ18Ocell) reveal long‐term, integrated physiological responses to environmental conditions. We incorporated a submodel of δ18Ocell into the widely used Physiological Principles in Predicting Growth (3‐PG) model for the first time, to complement a recently added δ13Ccell submodel. We...

Climate change is projected to impact ecosystem functioning, however its effect on the provision of ecosystem services is uncertain. This is particularly relevant on federal lands which harbor extensive tracts of natural vegetation. We assessed change in four ecosystem services (water runoff, groundwater recharge, carbon storage, and biodiversity) and one disservice (sediment export) in southern California between current and end-of-century (2070–2099). We used five general circulation models ranging from warmer wetter (CNRM-CM5, CCSM4) to hotter, marginally drier (IPSL-CM5A-LR) to hotter...

In this paper, we present a web-based decision support system (DSS)—wSADfLOR—to facilitate the access of stakeholders to tools that may contribute to enhancing forest management planning. The emphasis is on a web-based architecture and a web graphic user interface (wGUI) that may effectively support the analysis of trade-offs between ecosystem services in order to address participatory and sustainable forest management objectives. For that purpose, the wGUI provides remote access to a management information system, enabling users to analyze environmental and biometric data and topological...

Ecological zonation is a fundamental tool for territorial and ecosystem management. The Holdridge model is a system of ecological zoning based on the identification of bioclimatic units (life zones) that employs the variables of biotemperature, precipitation, potential evapotranspiration (EVP), EVP/P ratio, latitude, and altitude. Argentina displays high environmental variability. However, despite the completion of several comprehensive zonations of intrinsic scientific value, the country lacks an ecological zonation with objectively and precisely delimited units that may be repeated...

Live trapping is a common tool used to assess demography of small mammals. However, live-trapping is often expensive and stressful to captured individuals. Thus, assessing the relative tradeoffs among study goals, project expenses, and animal well-being is necessary. Here, we evaluated how apparent bias and precision of estimates for apparent annual survival, abundance, capture probability, and recapture probability of Humboldt’s flying squirrels (Glaucomys oregonensis) varied with the number of secondary trapping occasions. We used data from forested sites trapped on 12 consecutive...

The Arctic and boreal regions are warming more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the world. The timing of plants’ flowering and fruiting is changing, with implications for insects, wildlife, and people who rely on these resources for food and livelihoods in Alaska. Alaska’s boreal forest will undergo significant functional and structural changes within the next few decades that are unprecedented in the past 6,000 years. The Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research program is critical to Forest Service research because it is the only Forest Service outpost in the boreal forest, which...