Treesearch

Post-fire assessment is made after a wildfire incident to provide details about damage level and its distribution over burned areas. Such assessments inform restoration plans and future monitoring of ecosystem recovery. Due to the high cost and time to conduct fieldwork, remote sensing is an appealing alternative to assess post-fire condition over larger areas than can be surveyed practically in the field. The aim of this study is to use remote sensing data to characterize post-fire severity at tree level in a mixed conifer forest following the Cascade and East Zone megafires of 2007 in...

Aldo & Leonardo, a partnership between Colorado Art Ranch and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, was a project to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. The project was inspired by the scientific wisdom of Aldo Leopold and the artistic genius of Leonardo da Vinci. Our endeavor was an interdisciplinary collaboration of artists and scientists designed to celebrate the lands, resources and opportunities protected by the Wilderness Act. In 2013, we hosted one-month residencies in six diverse wilderness areas. Artists worked alongside wildland research scientists and...

Aldo & Leonardo, una asociación entre Colorado Art Ranch y el Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, fue un proyecto encargado de celebrar el 50 aniversario de la Ley sobre la Vida Silvestre. El proyecto se inspiró en la sabiduría científica de Aldo Leopold y el genio artístico de Leonardo da Vinci. Nuestro esfuerzo fue una colaboración interdisciplinaria de artistas y científicos diseñada para celebrar las tierras, los recursos y las oportunidades protegidos por la Ley de Vida Silvestre. En 2013, organizamos residencias de un mes en seis áreas silvestres diversas. Los artistas...

In fire-adapted conifer forests of the Western U.S., changing land use has led to increased forest densities and fuel conditions partly responsible for increasing the extent of high-severity wildfires in the region. In response, land managers often use mechanical thinning treatments to reduce fuels and increase overstory structural complexity, which can help improve stand resilience and restore complex spatial patterns that once characterized these stands. The outcomes of these treatments can vary greatly, resulting in a large gradient in aggregation of residual overstory trees. However,...

Since the 1930s, the United States Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program has inventoried the nation’s forests to produce “The Nation’s Forest Census.” This census provides valuable snapshots of forests in the lower 48 states, Hawaii, southeast Alaska, and the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands. Although select areas of interior Alaska have been inventoried, a systematic inventory hasn’t been conducted due to the interior’s remoteness and correspondingly higher inventory costs.A team composed of researchers with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station,...

The new IUFRO President 2019-2024 Dr. John Parrotta, US Forest Service, summarizes his vision of the present challenges to global forests and the role of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO). This paper is drawn from his acceptance speech at the XXV IUFRO World Congress held in Curitiba, Brazil, on 29 Sept - 5 Oct 2019.

Fuel treatments are widely used to alter fuels in forested ecosystems to mitigate wildfire behavior and effects. However, few studies have examined long-term ecological effects of interacting fuel treatments (commercial harvests, pre-commercial thinnings, pile and burning, and prescribed fire) and wildfire. Using annually fitted Landsat satellite-derived Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) curves and paired pre-fire treated and untreated field sites, we tested changes in the differenced NBR (dNBR) and years since treatment as predictors of biophysical attributes one and nine years after the 2007...

Wildland fire is a major producer of aerosols from combustion of vegetation and soils, but little is known about the abundance and composition of smoke’s biological content. Bioaerosols, or aerosols derived from biological sources, may be a significant component of the aerosol load vectored in wildland fire smoke. If bioaerosols are injected into the upper troposphere via high-intensity wildland fires and transported across continents, there may be consequences for the ecosystems they reach. Such transport would also alter the concept of a wildfire’s perimeter and the disturbance domain of...

Understanding the benefits received from urban greenspace is critical for planning and decision-making. The benefits of parks can be challenging to measure and evaluate, which calls for the development of novel methods. Crowdsourced data from social media can provide a platform for measuring and understanding social values. However, such methods can have drawbacks, including representation bias, undirected content, and a lack of demographic data. We compare the amount and distribution of park benefits elicited from (1) tweets on Twitter about Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York (n = 451)...

Agricultural landscapes in south Asia have high human densities, experience year-round cropping, and the few remaining wetlands experience heavy human use. Factors affecting the breeding success of colonially-nesting waterbirds in such conditions are poorly understood. Using Bayesian Network (BN) models, we explored the importance of colony size, extent of persisting wetlands, human influence as proximity to habitation, and variation in landscape conditions due to changing crops (season) on the breeding success of two stork species – the Asian Openbill Anastomus oscitans and the Lesser...