Treesearch

The success or failure of apex carnivore reintroduction efforts can hinge on understanding and attending to diverse viewpoints of those involved in and impacted by reintroductions. Yet, viewpoints vary widely due to a suite of complex and intersecting factors, such as values, beliefs and sociocultural context. We ask, ‘what are the diverse viewpoints that exist surrounding apex carnivore recovery and what kinds of emotional, analytical and values-based judgments might people use to construct their viewpoints?’ We used Q-methodology to identify distinct, generalized viewpoints and areas of...

Land managers across western North America are increasingly treating forests with mechanical thinning and prescribed fire to reduce stand density, with the aims of reducing wildfire risks and generating conditions that better align with historic forest structure. The effects of these treatments on invertebrates in forests is poorly understood, especially over longer time scales. We tested for effects of three forest treatments on butterfly and bumble bee abundance and species richness in a ponderosa pine and white fir forest in northern California, USA, that was treated systematically two...

The California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis), an older forest species of conservation concern, has declined in many historically occupied forests due to habitat loss from severe wildfire and other environmental changes. Although population trends have been well documented in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the western United States, less is known about population status at the range boundary in Southern California, a region experiencing rapid environmental change. Therefore, we conducted extensive spotted owl nighttime surveys during the 2022 breeding season in the San...

Protected areas form the backbone of modern conservation. However, the current policies and practices in protected areas reinforce a static view of nature. This view is further enabled by cultural resistance to change, including efforts to mitigate or exclude keystone ecosystem processes (e.g., characteristic wildfire) that that create and maintain desired conditions. This protectionist model of conservation undervalues the human role in generating landscape dynamics and will be ineffective over the long term and increasingly in the short term. Under climatic change, resisting natural...

Does environmental DNA (eDNA) concentration correlate with numerical abundance (N) or biomass in aquatic organisms? We hypothesize that eDNA can be adjusted to simultaneously reflect both. Building on frameworks developed from the Metabolic Theory of Ecology, we derive two equations to adjust eDNA data to simultaneously reflect both N and biomass using population size structure data and allometric scaling coefficients. We also demonstrate that these equations share model parameters, necessitating the joint estimation of regressions between adjusted eDNA, N, and biomass. Furthermore, our...

The goal of the EcoVeg approach is to fully describe and classify the diversityof the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems based on vegetation and ecological pro-cesses. The EcoVeg approach was used to develop the International VegetationClassification (IVC) and various national classifications, which integrate pat-terns of vegetation growth form, structure, and floristics with ecological andbiogeographic drivers at multiple spatial scales, from global formations to localplant communities. The approach remains unique among terrestrial ecologicalclassifications in providing types at these scales....

Prey species adjust their behavior along human-use gradients by balancing risks from predators and humans. During hunting seasons, prey often exhibit strong antipredator responses to humans but may develop tolerance in suburban areas to exploit human-mediated resources. Additionally, areas with high human activity may offer reduced predation risk if apex predators avoid such locations. This study examined mule deer Odocoileus hemionus behavioral responses to risks from humans and their primary predators, cougars Puma concolor, contextualized by differences in risk levels between study...

In many forests globally, resilience-focused restoration is necessary to prevent fire-driven regime shifts. However, restoration planning is challenged by limited resources for monitoring biodiversity responses to management intervention and to natural disturbances. Bioregional-scale passive acoustic monitoring, when combined with automated species identification tools and management-relevant habitat data, can be a tractable method to simultaneously monitor suites of complementary indicator species and rapidly generate species-specific information for resource managers. We demonstrate...

Changing climate and its interaction with disturbances is reshaping forests of the western United States and southwestern forests are experiencing these changes at an accelerated pace. Southwestern forests are fire prone and a legacy of fire exclusion from past land use and management have homogenized many frequent fire forests, increasing the chance that disturbances reinforce landscape homogeneity. Widespread disturbances, especially those that cause a vegetation type change from forest to non-forest, are and will continue to influence the provision of ecosystem services upon which...

and anthropogenic climate change have led to larger, more severe fires that threaten many animal species where such disturbances do not occur naturally. As predators, owls can play important ecological roles in biological communities, but how changing fire regimes affect individual species and species assemblages is largely unknown. Here, we examined the impact of fire severity, history, and configuration over the past 35 years on an assemblage of six forest owl species in the Sierra Nevada, California, using ecosystem-scale passive acoustic monitoring. While the negative impacts of fire...