Treesearch

Each year, millions of songbirds concentrate in coastal areas during fall migration. The choices birds make at the coast about stopover habitat use and migratory route can influence both the success of their migratory journey and fitness in subsequent life stages. We made use of a regional-scale automated radio telemetry array to study stopover and migratory flights and migratory routes of blackpoll warblers Setophaga striata and red-eyed vireos Vireo olivaceus during fall migration in the Gulf of Maine, USA. We focused on differences between species, sexes, age groups, breeding origins,...

The phylogenetic relationship of eight species of Echinodontium, Laurilia, and Perplexostereum of Russulales were analyzed based on sequences of the nuc rDNA ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 (ITS [internal transcribed spacer]) and D1–D2 domains of nuc 28S rDNA (28S). Our results show that Echinodontium tinctorium, E. ryvardenii, and E. tsugicola represent Echinodontium sensu stricto. Based on morphological and phylogenetic evidence, the new genus Echinodontiellum is established to accommodate Echinodontium japonicum. Amylostereum, Echinodontium, Echinodontiellum, and Larssoniporia form the Echinodontiaceae...

Species delimitation in Pinaceae is often challenged by limited morphological differentiation and introgression. In Tsuga (hemlocks), species delimitation has been most challenging among northeastern Asian taxa, where the species are weakly marked morphologically and range in number from three to five in previous studies. Two low-copy nuclear four-coumarase-ligase (4CL) genes andmorphology strongly support a clade of the Japanese endemic T. diversifolia and T. sieboldii from Japan and Ulleung island (Ulleungdo) in Korea. This clade is here referred to as the oceanic hemlocks. 4CL strongly...

Collaborative efforts have expanded in recent years to reduce fuel loads and restore the resilience of forest landscapes to future fires. The social acceptability of harvesting and using forest biomass associated with these programs are a hot topic, with questions about the extent to which collaboration can generate unified acceptance. We present results from a Q-Method study of the variation of acceptability judgments of participants engaged in the Uncompahgre Plateau Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project in western Colorado in the United States. Four factors encompassing...

As climate change has contributed to longer fire seasons and populations living in fire-prone ecosystems increase, wildfires have begun to affect a growing number of people. As a result, interest in understanding the wildfire evacuation decision process has increased. Of particular interest is understanding why some people leave early, some choose to stay and defend their homes, and others wait to assess conditions before making a final decision. Individuals who tend to wait and see are of particular concern given the dangers of late evacuation. To understand what factors might influence...

Smoke from fire can sharply reduce air quality by releasing particulate matter, one of the most dangerous types of air pollution for human health. A third of U.S. households have someone sensitive to smoke. Minimizing the amount and impact of smoke is a high priority for land managers and regulators. One tool for achieving that goal is prescribed fire. Prescribed fire can be controlled and planned carefully to minimize smoke impacts and warn communities in advance. It can also help reduce decades worth of vegetation buildup from past fire exclusion and help restore dry, fire-adapted...

The eastward expansion of coyotes (Canis latrans) has brought the species into ecosystems and landscapes different from those it historically occupied, yet little is known about the reproductive biology of coyotes in the southeastern United States or the effects of exploitation on reproduction in coyotes. Our objective was to quantify litter size, pregnancy rate, and fecundity in an essentially unexploited coyote population in South Carolina, USA and to evaluate the effect of exploitation on these parameters. We examined reproductive tracts from 235 female coyotes trapped during 2010–2012....

Despite efforts to reduce their effects on livestock and native ungulates within the southeastern United States, coyotes (Canis latrans) can recover from control programs. It is unknown how coyotes compensate for high mortality following trapping, so there is great interest to identify methods that can provide insight into coyote response to intensive trapping. To investigate if population genetic tools can decipher how coyotes recover from intensive trapping, we combined an empirical test of how enetic differentiation, diversity, and familial structure changed following trapping on the...

Many bull trout populations have declined from non-native brook trout introductions, habitat changes (e.g. water temperature) and other factors. We systematically sampled the distribution of bull trout and brook trout in the upper Powder River basin in Oregon in the 1990s and resampled it in 2013–2015, examined temperature differences in the habitats of the two species and analysed trends in temperatures in the light of possible increases associated with climate change. The species’ distributions are currently similar to those in the 1990s, except in one stream where bull trout declined....

The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) has affected millions of acres of forests in the Rocky Mountain region in the United States. This study quantified the difficulty of harvesting beetle-killed stands caused by downed trees. A detailed time study was conducted on a whole-tree clearcut harvest using a ground-based system in western Montana in August 2015. Our study shows that the productivity of the feller-buncher was highly affected by the number of downed trees. The feller-buncher average cycle time per tree was 7.0 s when only standing trees were cut and bunched whereas it...