Treesearch

Wildland fire management faces unprecedented challenges in the 21st century: the increasingly apparent effects of climate change, more people and structures in the wildland-urban interface, growing costs associated with wildfire management, and the rise of high-impact fires, to name a few. Given these significant and growing challenges, conventional fire management approaches are unlikely to be effective in the future. Innovative and forward-looking approaches are needed. This study explored wildland fire management futures by using methods and diverse perspectives from futures research....

Text-based asynchronous online conferencing involves structured online discussion and deliberation among multiple participants from multiple sites in which there is a delay in interaction between contributors. This method has been widely used for a variety of purposes in higher education and other settings, but has not been commonly used in futures research. This paper describes an asynchronous online foresight panel process. The method is illustrated with the case of a recent foresight panel on the future of wildland fire management.

The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service (Forest Service) manages 154 national forests and 20 grasslands in 44 states and Puerto Rico. National Forest Land and Resource Management Plans (forest plans) form the basis for land and resource management of national forests in the United States. For more than a decade the Forest Service has been attempting to incorporate innovative, collaborative public involvement strategies into the process for revising forest plans. In 2012 and 2015 the Forest Service codified new regulations for developing, revising, and amending forest...

Climate change is occurring in the Southeastern United States, and one manifestation is changes in frequency and intensity of extreme events. A vulnerability assessment is performed in the state of Georgia (United States) at the county level from 1975 to 2012 in decadal increments. Climate change vulnerability is typically measured as a function of exposure to physical phenomena (e.g., droughts, floods), sensitivity to factors affecting the social milieu, and the capacity of a given unit to adapt to changing physical conditions. The paper builds on previous assessments and offers a unique...

The Tenth World Wilderness Congress (WILD10) met in Salamanca, Spain in 2013. The symposium on science and stewardship to protect and sustain wilderness values was the largest of multiple symposia held in conjunction with the Congress. This symposium was organized and sponsored by the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, the Wildland Research Institute of the University of Leeds, CzechGlobe - Global Change Research Centre, and the WILD Foundation. The papers contained in these proceedings were generated at this symposium, but not all authors submitted papers for consideration for...

Many managers today are tasked with restoring forests to mitigate the potential for uncharacteristically severe fire. One challenge to this mandate is the lack of large-scale reference information on forest structure prior to impacts from Euro-American settlement. We used a robust 1911 historical dataset that covers a large geographic extent (>10,000 ha) and has unbiased sampling locations to compare past and current forest conditions for ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests in the southern Sierra Nevada. The 1911 dataset contained records from 18,052 trees in 378 sampled transects,...

The upper Clark Fork River basin of western Montana supports a poorly understood sculpin (Uranidea spp.) fauna that has perplexed ichthyologists and fish ecologists since the late 1800s. During our study, the basin contained three sculpin taxa whose taxonomy was under revision. All three taxa were formerly referred to the genus Cottus but are now treated as Uranidea. Our goal was to improve understanding of the distribution and ecology of two of the taxa. From 2006 to 2009, we sampled 144 reaches in 31 streams and rivers to determine distributions of each taxa across the study area and...

The hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae Annand) is an invasive forest pest in eastern North America that has caused significant decline and mortality in populations of eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carr.) and Carolina hemlock (T. caroliniana Engelm.). The breeding of adelgid-resistant genotypes for reforestation activities is still in the early development phases, and most resistance screening programs have depended on labor-intensive direct artificial infestation techniques for introducing adelgids to target seedlings. We investigated the timing and effectiveness of a potential...

Many natural enemies employ plant- and/or herbivore-derived signals for host/prey location. The larval parasitoid Tetrastichus planipennisi Yang (Hymenoptera: Eulophidae) is 1 of 3 biocontrol agents currently being released in an effort to control the emerald ash borer (EAB), Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire (Coloeptera: Burprestidae) in NorthAmerica. To enhance its efficiency, allelochemicals that attract it need to be assessed. In this study, ash phloem volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of black, green, and white ash, and EAB larval frass were compared. Foraging behavior of T. planipennisi...

Surveys were collected to assess Forest Service (FS) resource managers' perceptions, attitudes, and informational needs related to climate change and its potential impacts on forests and grasslands. Resource managers with three background types were surveyed. All participants generally considered themselves to be well-informed on climate change issues, although each resource manager group had different perceptions of climate change effects on natural resources. They shared similar views on the most potentially useful sources of information and that there was less concern at the Ranger...