Treesearch

Rangeland landscapes occupy roughly 662 million acres in the coterminous U.S. (Reeves and Mitchell 2011) and their vegetation responds quickly to climate and management, with high relative growth rates and inter-annual variability. Current national decision support systems in the U.S. such as the Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFT-DSS) require spatially explicit information describing production, fuels, grazing capacity and successional trajectory. However, no single system presently offers this information. In addition, issues of increasing national attention, such...

A fungal pathogen soon to be described as Rutstroemia capillus-albis (Rutstroemiaceae, Helotiales, Leotiomycetes) has been identified as the causal agent of ‘bleach blonde syndrome’ on the invasive annual grass weed Bromus tectorum (cheatgrass) in western North America. This apparently common but previously undescribed disease causes premature senescence and sterility, but does not affect seed germination or seedling emergence and growth. This study investigated whether the new species produces phytotoxins that could be implicated in pathogenesis. The compounds 9-O-methylfusarubin,...

A species’ population structure and history are critical pieces of information that can help guide the use of available native plant materials in restoration treatments and decide what new native plant materials should be developed to meet future restoration needs. In the western United States, Pseudoroegneria spicata (bluebunch wheatgrass; Poaceae) is an important component of grassland and shrubland plant communities and commonly used for restoration due to its drought resistance and competitiveness with exotic weeds. We used next‐generation sequencing data to investigate the processes...

The Black Hills population of black-backed woodpeckers (Picoides arcticus) was petitioned, but deemed not warranted, to be listed as a threatened or endangered species under the Endangered Species Act and more information on their population size in the region is needed. Our objective was to map abundance and provide a population estimate of black-backed woodpeckers in the Black Hills and Bear Lodge Mountains of South Dakota and Wyoming, USA. We conducted 3,666 and 3,384 5-minute point count surveys from late-March to late-June in 2015 and 2016, respectively.We characterized vegetation...

Contemporary forest planning has tasked managers with developing goals associated with resistance and resilience. In practice, silviculturists use forest structure and tree species composition to characterize goals and desired future conditions, write prescriptions, and monitor outcomes associated with resistance and resilience. Although rarely discussed in the exploding literature relating to forest resistance and resilience, silvicultural regeneration methods are important and underutilized tools to meet these goals. We propose alternative silvicultural systems for building resistance...

Despite the widespread use of ponderosa pine as an important hydroclimate proxy, we actually understand very little about its climate response in the Northern Rockies. Here, we analyze two new ponderosa pine chronologies to investigate how climate influences annual growth. Despite differences in precipitation amount and timing and large elevation differences (1820 m versus 1060 m), ring width at both sites was strongly driven by water availability. The mid-elevation, water-limited site responded well to previous fall precipitation whereas the wetter, high-elevation site responded to...

The American marten (martes americana) is a species that is dependent on old conifer forest at middle to high elevations and is highly sensitive to habitat loss and fragmentation in a scale dependent fashion (e.g., Hargis et al. 1999; Wasserman et al. 2012a, b), and forest management is often influenced by considerations of how management will affect extent and pattern of marten habitat. Due to their dependence on extensive, unfragmented forest landscapes and microhabitat structures associated with late successional forest (Buskirk and Ruggiero 1994; Hargis et al. 1999), American marten...

Each year wildland fires kill and injure trees on millions of forested hectares globally, affecting plant and animal biodiversity, carbon storage, hydrologic processes, and ecosystem services. The underlying mechanisms of fire-caused tree mortality remain poorly understood, however, limiting the ability to accurately predict mortality and develop robust modeling applications, especially under novel future climates. Virtually all post-fire tree mortality prediction systems are based on the same underlying empirical model described in Ryan and Reinhardt (1988 Can. J. For. Res. 18 1291-7),...

i-Tree (www.itreetools.org) is a suite of freely-available software tools designed to assess the benefits and values derived from trees and forests. Originally released in 2006 and designed to work in the United States, these tools have expanded globally among professional and non-professional users (e.g., universities, citizens, schools, land managers, foresters) in more than 130 countries. i-Tree was developed through a collaborative public-private partnership and is designed to engage people in assessing and valuing their forest resources, understanding forest risk, and developing...

The genus Enlinia Aldrich, 1933 is recorded from French Guiana for the first time and six new species are described: E. loboptera n. sp., E. bova n. sp., E. colossicornis n. sp., E. mitarakensis n. sp., E. touroulti n. sp., and E. dalensi n. sp. A seventh unnamed species belonging to the E. armata Robinson, 1969 species group, and represented by a single female specimen, is also reported. These species were collected as part of the 2015 “Our Planet Revisited” survey in the Mitaraka Mountain area in far southwestern French Guiana. A key to the seven species known from French Guiana is provided.