Treesearch

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) uses three-dimensional (3D) models viewable in Google Earth in addition to traditional visual resource analysis tools to plan, visualize, and mitigate new landscape-altering projects. A rough model can be made in minutes, allowing for quick and inexpensive pre-planning. Even when sites are inaccessible due to winter snow, timing, cost, or other access issues, modeling gives an approximation of the look of the final project and identifies scenery concerns. Alternatives can be worked through "on the fly" during meetings with stakeholders or in the field...

Abstracts: Visual resource stewardship conference proceedings: landscape and seascape management in a time of change.

With the recent approval of numerous large-scale transmission lines and pipelines that are now moving toward construction, it is critically important to ensure that these projects are implemented based on findings and assumptions of their associated impact analyses. Although this seems obvious, it has not always occurred successfully on past projects and can be challenging depending on how analysis findings and mitigation measures are applied and tracked. Specifically, degrees of impact and application of mitigation measures are often described in text and/or on forms that do not specifical...

Visual resources are often a focal point of controversy and uncertainty and are becoming a growing concern for agencies, developers, and the public alike for the variety of utility-scale energy projects, including transmission, substation, power plant, and renewable energy projects. Agencies are increasingly challenged to interpret and enforce regulations for visual resources and balance multiple and often conflicting purposes for public lands. Developers are challenged by uncertainties about visual impacts of their proposed projects, strong public reactions and opposition, and how impacts...

With the increasing need for reliable energy infrastructure in the United States, the once natural openness of the Wild West has evolved into a web of infrastructure scattered across the landscape. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands managed under a multiple-use mission are no exception. While projects built on BLM land go through in-depth environmental analysis, including making recommendations for proper design features and mitigation measures to reduce impacts to visual resources, it is often difficult for BLM staff to ensure full implementation of these measures. This is sometimes a...

The Sonoran Desert landscape surrounding Tucson, Arizona, consists of sweeping skies punctuated by mountain ranges and saguaro silhouettes. As development occurred decades ago, land use codes and design practices were developed to protect this scenery. More recently, these codes have been ineffectual at integrating utilities into the urban landscape. Using overhead power lines in Tucson as an example, this paper discusses the decline of visual stewardship and impediments to halting this trend. As utility poles have increased substantially in size due to new regulatory requirements and...

Western dry conifer forests continue to experience increased severe, stand‐replacing wildfire that is outside of historical precedent. Fuels treatments, landscape‐scale modifications of forest fuels and structure, are likely to remain a management tool to modify fire behavior and restore ecological resilience. The impacts of fuels treatments to listed species such as spotted owls (Strix occidentalis) remain uncertain and are contested because of limited available information. To evaluate spotted owl foraging habitat selection in a landscape recently modified by forest fuels‐reduction...

We strategically placed spatially distributed sensors to provide representative measures of changes in snowpack and subsurface water storage, plus the fluxes affecting these stores, in a set of nested headwater catchments. The high temporal frequency and distributed coverage make the resulting data appropriate for process studies of snow accumulation and melt, infiltration, evapotranspiration, catchment water balance, (bio)geochemistry, and other critical-zone processes. We present 8 years of hourly snow-depth, soil-moisture, and soil-temperature data, as well as 14 years of quarter-hourly...

The present research examines the impact of visiting natural history museums on implicit connectedness with nature among youth. FlexiTwins, a computer-based game version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), was used to measure implicit connectedness with nature among youth visitors to two natural history museums in the Los Angeles area of Southern California. Overall, there was a marginally significant difference between pretest and posttest FlexiTwins scores. That is, implicit connectedness with nature increased after spending time in a natural history museum, although follow-up...

High-value trees, such as those growing in residential, recreational, or administrative sites, are often susceptible to colonization by bark beetles (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae) as a result of increased amounts of stress associated with off-site plantings, drought, soil compaction, and/or mechanical injury. The value of these trees, cost of removing dead trees, and loss of aesthetics often justify the use of insecticides to protect trees from mortality attributed to bark beetles. Carbaryl (1-naphthyl methylcarbamate) is among the most effective, economically-viable, and ecologica...