Treesearch

The term "rangeland" is rather nebulous, and there is no single definition of rangeland that is universally accepted by land managers, scientists, or international bodies (Lund, 2007; Reeves and Mitchell, 2011). Dozens and possibly hundreds (Lund, 2007) of definitions and ideologies exist because various stakeholders often have unique objectives requiring different information. For the purpose of describing the role of remote sensing in a global context, it is, however, necessary to provide definitions to orient the reader. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations...

Wildlife managers need reliable methods to estimate large carnivore densities and population trends; yet large carnivores are elusive, difficult to detect, and occur at low densities making traditional approaches intractable. Recent advances in spatial capture-recapture (SCR) models have provided new approaches for monitoring trends in wildlife abundance and these methods are particularly applicable to large carnivores. We applied SCR models in a Bayesian framework to estimate mountain lion densities in the Bitterroot Mountains of west central Montana. We incorporate an existing resource...

As well as being planted for wind breaks, landscape trees, and fuel wood, eucalypts are also widely used as urban street trees in California. They now are besieged by exotic insect herbivores of four different feeding guilds. The objective of the current analysis was to determine the return on investment from biological control programs that have targeted these pests. Independent estimates of the total number of eucalypt street trees in California ranged from a high of 476,527 trees (based on tree inventories from 135 California cities) to a low of 190,666 trees (based on 49 tree inventorie...

The science of growing reforestation and conservation plants in containers has continually evolved, and three simple observations may greatly improve seedling quality. First, retaining stock in its original container for more than one growing season should be avoided. Second, strongly taprooted species now being grown as bareroot stock may be good candidates for container production. Third, miniplug seedlings that combine growth in containers followed by bareroot culturing may be a way to improve bareroot bed density and shorten production cycles. This paper was presented at a joint...

Deadwood dynamics play a key role in many forest ecosystems. Understanding the mechanisms involved in the accumulation and depletion of deadwood can enhance our understanding of fundamental processes such as carbon sequestration and disturbance regimes, allowing better predictions of future changes related to alternative management and climate scenarios. A conceptual framework for deadwood dynamics has been generally accepted but has not been broadly tested with empirical data. We used a large (n ¼ 6191) data set containing measurements of live and standing dead trees, and downed woody...

Raptors that inhabit sagebrush steppe and grassland ecosystems in the western United States may be threatened by continued loss and modification of their habitat due to energy development, conversion to agriculture, and human encroachment. Actions to protect these species are hampered by a lack of reliable data on such basic information as population size and density. We estimated density and abundance of nesting pairs of Ferruginous Hawks (Buteo regalis) and Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) in sagebrush steppe and grassland regions of Wyoming, based on aerial line transect surveys of...

Ecological and land management applications would often benefit from maps of relative canopy cover of each species present within a pixel, instead of traditional remote-sensing based maps of either dominant species or percent canopy cover without regard to species composition. Widely used statistical models for remote sensing, such as randomForest (RF), support vector machines (SVM), and generalized linear regression (GLM), are problematic for this purpose as they often fail to properly predict the absence of a target species, especially in areas of high vegetation diversity, due to the...

This report summarizes the U.S. Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) forest inventory data, collected from 2008 to 2012, for Southern New England, defined as Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Forests cover an estimated 5,128,000 acres or 59 percent of Southern New England—1,736,000 acres in Connecticut (56 percent of the State), 3,028,000 acres in Massachusetts (61 percent), and 364,000 acres in Rhode Island (55 percent). There was no substantial change in the area of forest land between the current, 2012, and the previous, 2007, FIA inventories. Nearly two-thirds...

Quantifying forest carbon (C) stocks and stock change within a matrix of land use (LU) and LU change is a central component of large-scale forest C monitoring and reporting practices prescribed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Using a region–wide, repeated forest inventory, forest C stocks and stock change by pool were examined by LU categories. In eastern US forests, LU change is a substantial component of C sink strength (~37% of forest sink strength) only secondary to that of C accumulation in forests remaining forest where their comingling with other LUs does...

Light-emitting diode (LED) technology shows promise for supplementing photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) in forest nurseries because of the potential reduction in energy consumption and an ability to supply discrete wavelengths to optimize seedling growth. Our objective was to examine the effects of light spectra supplied by LED and traditional high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps on growth and physiology of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco) and Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii Parry ex Engelm.) seedlings. We used three latitudinal sources for each species: British...