Treesearch

Public agencies are increasingly held accountable for documenting the benefits and services they provide. Recreation is a key public benefit for most land-managing agencies and thus visitation is an important metric. Visitation estimates are also needed for planning improvements to infrastructure, for evaluating current capacity and potential resource damages, and for communicating with nearby communities and service partners. To meet their information needs, agencies are most often interested in destination-based measures of visitation. That is, their interest is in recreation trips that...

In many religions, the simple act of walking from one point to another, sometimes over great distances, becomes a life-changing event, often undertaken only once in a lifetime at great financial and physical cost. In recent decades, walkers often label themselves or are labeled by others as pilgrims, and their walks parallel traditional religious pilgrimages such as the Hajj or the Camino de Santiago. In this article, we examine 26 travel blogs of thru-hikers (or intended thru-hikers) of the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, U.S.A., for elements of spirituality...

Recent promotion and development of wood-based bioenergy in the U.S. South have targeted cellulosic liquid fuels for the transportation sector and wood pellets for power generation. Bioenergy development has promised to meet multiple sustainability goals including renewable energy, energy independence, new markets for wood, and rural development. On the other hand, it has garnered opposition from environmental groups for threatening forests and air quality and from conservatives who object to government subsidies and doubt climate science. A team of anthropologists undertook research on...

This article explores the role of the work environment in determining physical activity gained within and around the workplace. With most adults spending more than half of their waking day at work, the workplace is a promising venue for promoting physical activity. We used a sample of 147 employed women—median age = 53 years old; 42% meeting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) physical activity recommendations—wearing a GPS device and accelerometer on the hip for 7 days to assess location and physical activity at minute-level epochs. We analyzed the association between...

A growing body of research shows affluent White neighborhoods have more acres of parks and more park facilities than low-income ethnic minority communities in many Global North cities. Most of these investigations focused on neighborhood-level differences and did not analyze broader inequities across cities. This is a particularly significant limitation in the U.S., where changes in the political economy of parks due to a reduced local tax base have led cities to compete against each other to secure park funding from national nonprofits and public agencies. To address this gap, we examined...

Natural resource managers and planners must consider outdoor recreation’s longrun response to shifting population density, sociodemographic factors, land uses, and climate change. Projected rises in greenhouse gases imply changing minimum/maximum temperatures, potential evapotranspiration, and precipitation. The strong link between natural resource conditions and outdoor recreation suggests that longand short-term recreation planning requires knowledge of which activities and settings will be impacted by climate change. Climate change response is principally an adaptation strategy, as...

The 2015 inventory of the forests of the Northern Great Plains States (Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota) reports more than 6.8 million acres of forest land and almost 2.2 billion trees. Forest land is dominated by the ponderosa pine and sugarberry/hackberry/elm/green ash forest types, which together occupy one-third of the total forest land area. The volume of growing stock on timberland currently totals 4.6 billion cubic feet. The average annual net growth of live trees from 2010 to 2015 was nearly 157 million cubic feet per year. This report includes additional information...

This publication is part of a series that provides an overview of the presence of invasive plant species monitored on an extensive systematic network of plots measured by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station (NRS). Each research note features one of the invasive plants monitored on forested plots by NRS FIA in the 24 states of the Midwestern and Northeastern United States. Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus; also known as Asian bittersweet) is a woody vine that is native to China, Korea, and Japan that was introduced...

Fire regimes structure plant communities worldwide with regional and local factors, including anthropogenic fire management, influencing fire frequency and severity. Forests of the Rogue River Basin in Oregon, USA, are both productive and fire-prone due to ample winter precipitation and summer drought; yet management in this region is strongly influenced by forest practices that depend on fire exclusion. Regionally, climate change is increasing fire frequency, elevating the importance of understanding historically frequent-fire regimes. We use cross-dated fire-scars to characterize...

Conventional methods utilized for clinical diagnosis of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases have employed invasive medical procedures that cause stress, anxiety and pain to patients. These methods are often expensive, time-consuming, and require sophisticated chemical-analysis instruments and advanced modeling procedures to achieve diagnostic interpretations. This paper reviews recent applications of simpler, electronic-nose (e-nose) devices for the noninvasive early diagnosis of a wide range of GI diseases by collective analysis of headspace volatile organic compound (VOC)-metabolites from...