Treesearch

Effective wildlife conservation requires frequent and widespread data on species occurrence. With the maturation of eDNA-based monitoring - now widely recognized as sensitive, cost effective, and legally defensible - nationally coordinated eDNA strategies are beginning to take shape. Such ambitious initiatives will require eDNA analytics with the throughput and sensitivity required for surveillance of many protected, pathogenic, and invasive species across broad geographic scales. Here, we help meet this need with SmartScreen-AIS: a high-throughput qPCR (HT-qPCR) chip with 46 assays...

Background. Wildland firefighters are exposed to hazards when working which can, and do, result in serious injury or death. Understanding the activities in which firefighters are engaged when they are injured, the hazards to which they were exposed during that activity and the resulting injury severity is critical to manage the risk of serious injury to firefighters.Aims. This study aims to provide an assessment of wildland firefighter injuries.Methods. A set of 435 severe injuries in wildland firefighters in the United States from 2019 to 2023 was classified by activity being performed,...

Changing fire regimes have important implications for biodiversity and challenge traditional conservation approaches that rely on historical conditions as proxies for ecological integrity. This historical-centric approach becomes increasingly tenuous under climate change, necessitating direct tests of environmental impacts on biodiversity. At the same time, widespread departures from historical fire regimes have limited the ability to sample diverse fire histories. We examined 2 areas in California’s Sierra Nevada (USA) with active fire regimes to study the responses of bird, plant, and...

Everglades National Park (EVER) is located within fifty miles of Miami, Florida. Miami-Dade County is home to approximately 2.7 million people with 71.6 percent of the population identifying as Hispanic or Latino. Despite proximity to this diverse urban area, the demographics of EVER’s visitors largely do not represent the surrounding community. Conceptual frameworks of constraints can facilitate understanding of low park visitation among traditionally underserved communities; however, they have been criticized for being relatively superficial due to their predominantly quantitative...

Climate adaptation requires actionable scientific information about potential climate impacts. Spatial climate analogs answer the question, ‘where does the future climate of a focal location occur today?’ Analogs provide a means to develop measures of climate change exposure and can be applied to project climate change impacts. Although analogs are the basis for empirical models, recent applications of analogs have been structured as spatial models, which can contribute distinct information compared to more commonly used nonspatial approaches. Analogs may improve our ability to communicate...

Background: Despite progress in reducing industrial air pollution, rising wildfire frequency and intensity, driven in part by climate change, pose significant health risks. Accurate estimates of wildfire-generated fine particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter <2.5μm (PM2.5) are needed for advancing health research, policymaking, and environmental protection.Objective: This review evaluates existing methodologies and data sources for estimating wildfire-generated PM2.5, aiming to improving accuracy and accessibility for health research, policy development, and environmental management...

This report updates estimates presented in Forest Resources of the Tanana Unit, Alaska: 2018 (Cahoon and Baer 2022) from forests in the Tanana unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) interior Alaska inventory. In September 2023, the FIA program published a new modeling system for predicting tree volume, biomass, and carbon attributes called the National Scale Volume and Biomass (NSVB) framework. The new equations provide a more consistent and accurate accounting of structural components of trees across the United States. The FIA...

Cut stumps can be temporary hot spots of carbon emissions due to connections to decaying root systems. Drivers of variation in stump decomposition have yet to be clearly identified, including interactions with stump sprouting, an important regeneration pathway after harvest in temperate deciduous forests. The aim of this study was to identify the effects of sprouting relative to other abiotic and biotic factors on carbon emissions from cut stumps. We measured carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) flux from the surface of cut stumps 0–4 years following a canopy gap harvest in an upland...

Soil seed banks are the hidden reservoir of forest plant diversity. Seed banking is a reproductive adaptation that allows plants to persist belowground as dormant seeds, where the soil serves as a buffer from aboveground disturbances. They play a key role in the recovery of forests post-disturbance, and it’s the post-disturbance plant recovery that replenishes, or makes seed deposits, in the seed bank. Since certain plant species are favored or disfavored by the type of forest disturbance, seed banks can vary depending on the disturbance affecting aboveground plants, and the abundance and...

This essay examines the important roles of growth and yield models in forest management decision-making in the Pacific Northwest United States. It outlines how these models help managers evaluate and optimize forest productivity on commercial timberlands by incorporating site indices, growth responses to silvicultural treatments like thinning, fertilization, and vegetation control, the potential impacts of climate change, and other factors. The essay reflects on how growth and yield models help forest managers optimize stand development, balance multiple objectives, and adapt to changing...