Treesearch

Eighteen years ago, in this journal, Gillespie (1999) described the transition of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program from its historical practice of periodic, state-level inventories to a spatially and temporally balanced annualized inventory. The article offered a rationale for the change and also noted some of the concerns and challenges of implementing this approach nationally. One of the key points in Gillespie’s (1999, p. 16) rationale was that conducting annual inventory in all states every year would "make it easier for...

Integration of Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plot data with Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) data can provide new information about fire effects on forests. This integration allowed broad-scale assessment of the cover types burned in large fires, the relationship between prefire stand conditions and fire severity, and postfire stand conditions. Of the 42.5 million acres burned in eight Interior West states since 1984, 41.4% was forestland. Forest types with the most burned acreage were ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine, and Douglas-fir. Nearly 35% of plots had no live basal...

Tree species are highly vulnerable to anthropogenic environmental change, and are increasingly being challenged by non-native pests and climate change. Rocky Mountain bristlecone pines are long-lived, exhibit delayed maturation, have low genetic diversity, and inhabit cold, high-elevation environments. They are threatened by the non-native disease white pine blister rust, warming temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and altered disturbance regimes. The goal of this work was to (1) sample the range-wide genetic diversity of bristlecone pine for ex situ seed and tissue collections...

Wildland fire can alter mercury (Hg) cycling on land and in adjacent aquatic environments. In addition to enhancing local atmospheric Hg redeposition, fire can influence terrestrial movement of Hg and other elements into lakes via runoff from burned upland soil. However, the impact of fire on water quality and the accumulation of Hg in fish remain equivocal. We investigated the effects of fire—specifically, a low-severity prescribed fire and moderate-severity wildfire—on young-of- the-year yellow perch (Perca flavescens) and lake chemistry in a small remote watershed in the Boundary Waters...

This study investigated the effects of culvert replacement design on fish habitat and fish weight by comparing substrate diversity and weight at three stream simulation (SS)-design and three bankfull and backwater (BB)-design sites on the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, Wisconsin. Stream channel cross-sections, Wolman substrate particle counts, and single-pass backpack electro-fishing survey data were used to quantify fish habitat and fish weight in 50-m upstream and downstream sample reaches at each site. We applied generalized linear mixed models to test the hypothesis that substrate...

Progress in understanding changes in soil biology in response to latitude, elevation and disturbance gradients has generally lagged behind studies of above-ground plants and animals owing to methodological constraints and high diversity and complexity of interactions in below-ground food webs. New methods have opened research opportunities in below-ground systems, leading to a rapid increase in studies of below-ground organisms and processes. Here, we summarize results of forest soil biology research over the past 25 years in Puerto Rico as part of a 75th Anniversary Symposium on research...

Context Resilience, the ability to recover from disturbance, has risen to the forefront of scientific policy, but is difficult to quantify, particularly in large, forested landscapes subject to disturbances, management, and climate change. Objectives Our objective was to determine which spatial drivers will control landscape resilience over the next century, given a range of plausible climate projections across north-central Minnesota. Methods Using a simulation modelling approach, we simulated wind disturbance in a 4.3 million ha forested landscape in north-central Minnesota for 100 years...

Fire suppression and other factors have resulted in high wildfire risk in the western US, and prescribed burning can be an effective tool for thinning forests and reducing fuels to lessen wildfire risks. However, prescribed burning sometimes fails to substantially reduce fuels and sometimes damages and kills valuable, large trees. This study compared fuel reductions between spring and fall prescribed burns and tested whether removing (i.e., raking) fuels within 1 m of boles reduced fire damage to ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Douglas ex Lawson & C. Lawson). In 2007 and 2008, raking was...

Understanding ecohydrological response to environmental change is critical for protecting watershed functions, sustaining clean water supply, and other ecosystem services, safeguarding public safety, floods mitigation, and drought response. Understanding ecohyhdrological processes and their implications to forest and water management has become increasingly important in the Anthropocene (Li et al., 2017; Sun & Vose, 2016). In forested watersheds or landscapes, the complex relationships between climate and forest cover are commonly viewed as two key drivers of ecohydrological processes....

Context: The forests of Borneo have among the highest biodiversity and also the highest forest loss rates on the planet. Objectives: Our objectives were to: (1) compare multiple modelling approaches, (2) evaluate the utility of landscape composition and configuration as predictors, (3) assess the influence of the ratio of forest loss and persistence points in the training sample, (4) identify the multiple-scale drivers of recent forest loss and (5) predict future forest loss risk across Borneo. Methods We compared random forest machine learning and logistic regression in a multi-scale...