Treesearch

Forest thinning to protect the soil and improve hydrologic function is used to alter stand structure and increase residual tree growth. However, little is known about how surface and belowground wood decomposition (i.e., soil process changes) respond to aboveground vegetation manipulation. We determined mass loss of three species of wood stakes (loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.), trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.), and Chinese pine (Pinus tabuliformis Carriére)) placed horizontally on the soil surface and vertically in the mineral soil after thinning a Chinese pine plantation in...

Post-fire flooding and elevated sediment loads in channels can pose hazards to people and structures within the wildland-urban interface. Mitigation of these hazards is essential to protect downstream resources. Straw bale check dams are one treatment designed to reduce sediment yields in small ephemeral catchments (b2 ha). This study investigated their effectiveness in five paired catchments burned at high severity during the 2010 Twitchell Canyon Fire in Utah. Rainfall, ground cover and hillslope erosion rates were also measured during the two-year study. Adjacent paired catchments were...

Wildfires are known to change post-fire watershed conditions such that hillslopes can become prone to increased erosion and sediment delivery. In this work, we coupled wildfire spread and erosion prediction modelling to assess the benefits of fuel reduction treatments in preventing soil runoff. The study was conducted in a 68 000-ha forest area located in Sardinia, Italy. We compared no-treatment conditions v. alternative strategic fuel treatments performed in 15% of the area. Fire behaviour before and after treatments was estimated by simulating 25 000 wildfires for each condition using...

Research Highlights: Estimates using measurements from a sample of approximately 132,000 field plots imply that while the species composition of US forests varies substantially across different age groups, the specific gravity of wood in those forests does not. This suggests that models using increasingly accurate spaceborne measurements of tree size to model forest biomass do not need to consider stand age as a covariate, greatly reducing model complexity and calibration data requirements. Background and Objectives: Upcoming lidar and radar platforms will give us unprecedented information...

The U.S. Geological Survey Land Change Monitoring, Assessment and Projection (USGS LCMAP) initiative is working toward a comprehensive capability to characterize land cover and land cover change using dense Landsat time series data. A suite of products including annual land cover maps and annual land cover change maps will be produced using the Landsat 4-8 data record. LCMAP products will initially be created for the conterminous United States (CONUS) and then extended to include Alaska and Hawaii. A critical component of LCMAP is the collection of reference data using the TimeSync tool, a...

The United States (U.S.) federal government provides imagery obtained by federally funded Earth Observation satellites typically at no cost. For many years Landsat was an exception to this trend, until 2008 when the United States Geological Survey (USGS) made Landsat data accessible via the internet for free. Substantial increases in downloads of Landsat imagery ensued and led to a rapid expansion of science and operational applications, serving government, private sector, and civil society. The Landsat program hence provides an example to space agencies worldwide on the value of open...

Background: Straw mulching is one of the most common treatments applied immediately post fire to reduce soil erosion potential and mitigate post-fire effects on water quality, downstream property, and infrastructure, but little is known about the long-term effects on vegetation response. We sampled six fires that were mulched between 9 and 13 years ago in western US dry conifer forests. We compared understory plant species diversity and abundance, tree seedling density and height by species, and fractional ground cover on mulched and unmulched paired plots. Results: Mulch did not influence...

Following publication of the original article (Hyde et al., 2015), the authors have noticed two errors in the summarizing of our results and wish to point out the following corrections. Original article: Hyde, Josh; Strand, Eva K.; Hudak, Andrew T.; Hamilton, Dale. 2015. A case study comparison of landfire fuel loading and emissions generation on a mixed conifer forest in northern Idaho, USA. Fire Ecology. 11(3): 108-127. https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/50203

Fire is a keystone process that drives patterns of biodiversity globally. In frequently burned fire-dependent ecosystems, surface fire regimes allow for the coexistence of high plant diversity at fine scales even where soils are uniform. The mechanisms on how fire impacts groundcover community dynamics are, however, poorly understood. Because fire can act as a stochastic agent of mortality, we hypothesized that a neutral mechanism might be responsible for maintaining plant diversity. We used the demographic parameters of the unified neutral theory of biodiversity (UNTB) as a foundation to...

Background: Wildfire is an important ecological process in mixed conifer forests of the Intermountain West region of the USA. However, researchers and managers are concerned because climate warming has led to increased fire activity in recent decades. More area burned will result in larger land areas in early successional stages and will potentially limit tree establishment; therefore, evaluating long-term forest understory response to fire is important. We evaluate the impact of burn severity, overstory canopy cover, topography, and climate on understory plant community diversity and...