Treesearch

Coastal forests in the eastern United States are increasingly threatened by hurricanes; however, monitoring their initial impacts and subsequent recovery is challenging across scales. Understanding disturbance impacts and responses is essential for sustainable forest management, biodiversity conservation, and climate change adaptation. Using Sentinel‑2 imagery, we calculated the annual Normalized Difference Vegetation Index change (ΔNDVI) of forests before and after Hurricane Michael (HM) in Florida to determine how different forest use types were impacted, including the initial wind...

The U.S.-Canada softwood lumber dispute stands as the most protracted trade conflict between the two countries, with its history dating back to the early 1980s. U.S. lumber producers claim that Canadian lumber imports are unfairly subsidized, thereby, harming the domestic lumber industry. The U.S. has imposed countervailing and antidumping duties on Canadian softwood lumber imports to protect the domestic market. An important aspect of this trade dispute is the substitutability of lumber products between the two countries. Canadian lumber imports are detrimental to the U.S. industry only...

For a few years, it seemed as if everything was burning down. In 2020 and 2021, in California, Oregon and Washington, US fire records were shattered, with devastating effects for wildlife habitat. In 2020, 4 million hectares of drought-stricken wetland and savannah burnt in the Brazilian Pantanal region, killing 17 million animals. In late 2019 and early 2020, bushfires raged during the height of summer in Australia, burning an astonishing 10.3 million hectares of shrubland and forest, corresponding to just under half the area of the United Kingdom. Writing in Nature, Driscoll et al....

Hunting has important social, cultural, economic, and conservation benefits. Information on hunters’ motivations and expectations for a hunting experience can help support decision-making by state and federal wildlife managers. We surveyed deer (Odocoileus spp.) and elk (Cervus canadensis) hunters participating in controlled hunts in eastern Oregon to describe hunter characteristics and experiences, including the importance of hunting motivational factors and specific setting attributes (2017–2019; n = 501). We compared differences between hunters’ ratings of importance and satisfaction...

Background - Modern land management faces unprecedented uncertainty regarding future climates, novel disturbance regimes, and unanticipated ecological feedbacks. Mitigating this uncertainty requires a cohesive landscape management strategy that utilizes multiple methods to optimize benefits while hedging risks amidst uncertain futures. We used a process-based landscape simulation model (LANDIS-II) to forecast forest management, growth, climate effects, and future wildfire dynamics, and we distilled results using a decision support tool allowing us to examine tradeoffs between alternative...

Natural resource agencies are frequently tasked with monitoring populations of at-risk species to ensure management activities do not negatively affect the viability of wildlife populations. Typically, these monitoring efforts evaluate trends in a population’s abundance, occupancy, or geographic distribution. Often, surveys provide local information, but results are generally not incorporated into broad-scale monitoring efforts that focus on range-wide population changes due to their variable nature in both spatial extent and effort. We investigated whether aggregating these local (hereafte...

The Tricolored Bat (Perimyotis subflavus) has suffered significant population declines in much of its geographic range due to white-nose syndrome (WNS). Our aim was to describe the torpor patterns of tricolored bats within the southeastern United States to further our understanding of their winter ecology and potential susceptibility to WNS in currently unimpacted areas based on data from bats in both a WNS-affected hibernaculum and an unaffected hibernaculum. We placed temperature-sensitive radio transmitters on tricolored bats in a site in northwestern South Carolina that was WNS-positive...

We present a mixed integer programming model for prioritizing fuel treatments within a landscape fuel break network to maximize protection against wildfires, measured by the total fire size reduction or the sum of Wildland Urban Interface areas avoided from burning. This model uses a large dataset of simulated wildfires in a large landscape to inform fuel break treatment decisions. Its mathematical formulation is concise and computationally efficient, allowing for customization and expansion to address more complex and challenging fuel break management problems in diverse landscapes. We...

To address impacts of climate change and other stressors on stream ecosystems, managers must prioritize resources and locations for conservation actions to facilitate effective cross-boundary solutions. Through a science management partnership, we co-produced a spatially explicit landscape assessment framework for cold-water fish habitat and riparian corridors in three large watersheds of the southwestern United States. Using literature review and stakeholder workshops, we developed indicators of vulnerability and built spatial datasets depicting areas of low to high vulnerability based on...

This study explores wildfire risk and preparedness among mobile home park residents in Leadville, Colorado - a town of 2,633 residents within the wildland-urban interface (WUI) of Lake County, Colorado, a region at increasingly high risk for wildfire. Residents in mobile home parks are socially vulnerable to disasters and their manufactured homes are highly susceptible to fire. Although mobile home parks are a critical form of affordable housing, their wildfire risk and their residents’ preparedness for wildfires are understudied. This multi-methods project - conducted in partnership with...