Treesearch

The escalating wildfire problem in Portugal motivated policymakers to develop a wildfire management plan that calls for rural fuel reduction throughout the country. The plan specifies fuel treatments on 250,000-300,000 ha per year over 10 years. Spatial priorities for treatments were delegated to regional and municipal entities. We use a scenario optimization model to allocate and map fuel treatment projects using three hazard metrics (ignition probability, building exposure to wildfire, and potential large fires). The results reveal sharp decision trade-offs among the three priorities...

In 2001, Lynch and Mackes published Wood Use in Colorado at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Lynch and Mackes 2001). Now more than twenty years later, this report updates wood use data and information to provide a current description and quantification of woody biomass utilization, consumption, and production in the state of Colorado. This assessment contributes to the ongoing discourse concerning sustainable solutions to the environmental challenges in Colorado forests, including uncharacteristic wildfires, increased mortality from insects, disease, and drought, and reduced productivi...

This research note describes the development of a pre-assessment survey of urban Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) youth participating in the Outward Bound Adventures (OBA) Environmental Studies Expeditions (ESE) program. The objective of the pre-assessment was to understand their baseline perceptions of nature and their experiences with the outdoors within their cultural context, as well as to inform the pre-and post-surveys that would be used to measure the benefits of OBA’s ESE program by focusing on participants’ understanding of nature, self-improvement, and the effect of...

Advance preparation for wildfire is essential for safe evacuation, and fire weather warnings can alert people to times of high fire danger when additional actions are recommended. However, little is known about the level of preparation of most wildland-urban interface (WUI) community residents, and potential influences on them carrying out preparatory actions. This study assessed the personal preparation undertaken by residents of California, United States, communities, including understanding of and response to fire weather warnings issued by the National Weather Service. We used a...

Cellulose is the most abundant naturally occurring polysaccharide. Its inherent mechanical stability, biocompatibility, biodegradability, and abundant hydroxyl groups available for derivatization provide benefits in the production of fiber-based materials such as conductive fibers. Cellulose derivatives, including cellulose esters such as cellulose acetate (CA), are readily generated in the fiber form following dissolution using a variety of solvents. Electrospinning is one of the emerging technologies with an outstanding ability to regenerate fibers in the nanoscale range. Polyaniline...

Alterations to the fire regime have contributed to widespread regeneration failure in oak (Quercus) forests of the eastern United States. Our long-term study was initiated in 2010 in southern Indiana to examine how oak reproduction in a dry oak forest responded to shelterwood and midstory treatments followed by a spring prescribed burn. We tracked the survival, height, and resprout response of individual seedlings through time, and tallied overall seedling density pre- and post-treatments. Mixed-effects models and nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) ordination were used to evaluate...

Current and long-term historic commercial logging in the Black Hills National Forest provided a cost-effective opportunity to investigate exotic plant responses to a wide range of thinning intensities on a large scale. We asked two questions. First, after over 125 years of post-settlement commercial logging, what role does the pre-harvest exotic plant community play in post-harvest responses to logging. Second, how does a broad range of harvest intensities influence exotic plant responses on a large spatial scale. We averaged exotic species relative cover and relative richness to create a...

Background. Wildfires, prescribed fires and slash-pile burns are disturbances that occur in many terrestrial ecosystems. Such fires produce variable surface heat fluxes causing a spectrum of effects on soil, such as seed mortality, nutrient loss, changes in microbial activity and water repellency. Accurately modeling soil heating is vital to predicting these second-order fire effects. The process-based Massman HMV (Heat-Moisture-Vapor) model incorporates soil water evaporation, heat transport and water vapor movement, and captures the observed rapid evaporation of soil moisture. Aims....

Although coal extraction is an important source of income for several countries, including Colombia, there are problems associated with mining activities, especially in open-pit coal mines. One of these is the deposition of air-borne dust in areas surrounding open pit mines, the accumulation of which can result in changes to the biogeochemistry of surrounding soils, as well as potential impacts on soil organisms, which have an important role in the maintenance of soil physicochemical properties, and other functional attributes of soils. This study aimed to determine the ecotoxicological...

Changing built environment conditions to impact health mindsets and health equity may be a promising target for public health interventions. The present study was a cluster randomized controlled trial to test the impact of remediating vacant and abandoned properties on factors related to health mindset—including well-being, health interconnectedness, social capital markers, neighborhood disorder, and worry—as well as direct and indirect violence experiences and the moderating role of racial and income segregation on outcomes. A residential cohort of 405 participants from 194 randomly...