Treesearch

In recent years, wildfires in the western United States have become more challenging to manage, with extreme wildfire behavior, larger fires, and longer fire seasons contributing to rising losses. Community and government leaders are realizing that suppression alone is untenable for future wildfire prevention and seek a wider range of risk reduction strategies from the community to the household levels. Simultaneously, these leaders are faced with the challenge of expeditiously rebuilding communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), sometimes after multiple fires that have occurred...

The interplay between tectonic rock uplift and climatically modulated erosion governs landscape evolution and influences how mountain ranges affect climate, biogeochemical cycling, ecology, and biodiversity. The Himalayas, Earth’s highest mountain range, have inspired a large body of work suggesting that Himalayan topography is primarily governed by southward-propagating tectonic deformation. Here, we use a new coupled surface process and orographic precipitation model to test this hypothesis, and to assess the extent to which orographic precipitation effects have modulated the influence...

As ecosystem disturbances increase due to human induced global change, accurately quantifying ecosystem resilience has never been more critical. This study introduces a spatially explicit Ecosystem Resilience Index (ERI), that integrates vegetation function, structure, and composition recovery metrics. We provide proof-of-concept for this index by applying it to a wildfire in northwestern Montana by leveraging novel and existing remote sensing datasets to evaluate ecosystem resilience and environmental drivers. First, we independently assessed each metric of ecosystem recovery, and...

The way a city or neighborhood is designed plays a significant but often overlooked role in the prevalence of firearm violence within communities and a growing body of research demonstrates that improving built environment conditions may have a profound impact on social interactions, crime rates, and ultimately, the occurrence of firearm-related incidents. In this chapter, we present an overview of select environmental factors, including the potential roles of green, blue, building and housing, commercial, situational, transportation, education and healthcare, and social infrastructure in...

Mortality risk is a critical and complex component of individual fitness and individual-based ecology, especially when risk-avoidance behaviors are considered. Organisms are subject to multiple kinds of risk that can vary with habitat, time, individual state, individual activity and behavior, and population status. Yet risk is often represented very simply in models and there is little literature on practical ways to model its variation. In our experience, desirable characteristics of risk models include: (a) survival probability can vary with multiple variables of individuals, habitat,...

Stream-dwelling salmonids in the low-latitude and -altitude margins of their range are particularly threatened by climate change. However, they possess a variety of evolutionary, plastic, and behavioural mechanisms that provide resistance against rapid changes in their environment. Behavioural plasticity can be important under rapid environmental change because it is relatively fast and flexible. In particular, salmonids can exhibit flexible diel activity patterns in response to new environmental conditions, but the consequences of this capability for long-term population persistence in...

Alley cropping consists of growing crops between rows of woody perennials and can involve many types of crops, including grapevines. In vineyard alley cropping systems, vines can sometimes be considered the overstory component, with understory crops grown between vine rows. Alternatively, vines can be considered the understory component, grown between rows of overstory trees or shrubs. This technical guide discusses the latter option:vineyard alley cropping systems in which rows of grapes are interspersed with widely spaced rows of trees or shrubs, to create an integrated system with...

Balsam woolly adelgid, Adelges piceae (Ratz.) (BWA), invasive in North America, was first detected on subalpine fir [Abies lasiocarpa (Hook.) Nutt.] in several northern Utah counties in 2017. BWA phenology is known to vary by elevation and climate; a degree-day (DD) model focused on population expansion into the Intermountain West is needed. Bark samples were collected weekly from infested subalpine fir in early summer through late fall at 5 northern Utah sites from August 2020 to December 2022. At a single site, additional samples were collected biweekly to monthly during winter and...

Data-driven decision support can help guide sustainable grazing management by providing an accurate estimate of grazing capacity, in coproduction with managers. Here, we described the development of a decision support model to estimate grazing capacity and illustrated its application on two sites in the western United States. For the Montgomery PassWild Horse Territory in California and Nevada, the upper limit estimated in the capacity assessment was 398 horses and the current population was 654 horses. For the Eagle Creek watershed of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest of eastern...

The relative influence of climate and Indigenous cultural burning on past forest composition in southern New England, US, remains debated. Employing varied analyses, this study compared data on Indigenous settlements from over 5000 years before present (YBP) with relative tree abundances estimated from pollen and land survey records. Results suggested that fire-tolerant vegetation, mainly oak (Quercus spp.), was more abundant near Indigenous settlements from 4955 to 205 YBP (i.e., 86-91% fire-tolerant trees), and significantly (p < 0.05) higher from 3205 to 205 YBP; fire-tolerant vegetation...