Treesearch

The future health of ecosystems is arguably as dependent on urban sprawl as it is on human caused climatic warming. Urban sprawl strongly impacts the urban ecosystems it creates and the natural and agro-ecosystems that it displaces and fragments. Here, we project urban sprawl changes for the next 50 years for the fast-growing Southeast U.S. Previous studies have focused on modeling population density, but the urban extent is arguably as important as population density per se in terms of its ecological and conservation impacts. We develop simulations using the SLEUTH urban growth model that...

The existence of thousands of soft-story woodframe buildings in California has been recognized as a disaster preparedness problem with concerted mitigation efforts underway in many cities throughout the state. The NEES-Soft project, whose full title is “Seismic Risk Reduction for Soft-Story Woodframe Buildings,” is a five-university multi-industry three-year project which has many facets including improved nonlinear numerical modeling, outreach, design method development, and full-scale system-level experimental validation of soft-story retrofit techniques. This paper summarizes the...

Empirical sensitivity analyses are important for evaluation of the effects of a changing climate on water resources and ecosystems. Although mechanistic models are commonly applied for evaluation of climate effects for snowmelt, empirical relationships provide a first-order validation of the various postulates required for their implementation. Previous studies of empirical sensitivity for April 1 snow water equivalent (SWE) in the western United States were developed by regressing interannual variations in SWE to winter precipitation and temperature. This offers a temporal analog for...

The Southern Blue Ridge Fire Learning Network (SBR FLN) is a cooperative program between the Forest Service, the Department of the Interior agencies, and The Nature Conservancy. Its goal is to restore forests and grasslands and to make (human) communities safer from fire. Since 2007, the SBR FLN has engaged Federal, State, and private partners to integrate science and local knowledge. Eight landscape teams focus on restoring pine and pine oak forests, primarily through prescribed burning. Common vegetation maps/models are used to identify areas most in need of restoration, and to develop a...

The Joint Fire Science Program’s Knowledge Exchange Consortia Network is actively working to accelerate the awareness, understanding, and adoption of wildland fire science information by Federal, tribal, State, local and private stakeholders within ecologically similar regions. Our network of 14 regional consortia provides timely, accurate, and regionally relevant science-based information to assist with fire management challenges. Regional activities, through which we engage fire managers, scientists, and private landowners, include online newsletters and announcements, social media,...

Natural resource managers have long desired to obtain user friendly, management directed answers from research results. Through partnerships with researchers, cooperative projects, and management hosted endeavors, mutually beneficial outcomes have been accomplished that provide quantifiable data and applicable direction for both research and management professionals. Often times, projects conducted by managers are further facilitated by having research associated elements, which provide support and justification through science-based monitoring and assessment to evaluate outcomes and...

SILVAH is a systematic approach to silvicultural prescription development based on inventory and analysis of stand data for Allegheny hardwood, northern hardwood, and mixed oak forests. SILVAH includes annual training sessions and decision support software, and it ensures a consistent, complete, and objective approach to prescriptions. SILVAH has created a community of practice with common vocabulary and framework for assessing forest stands. Lessons learned from thirty years of research-manager cooperation may be relevant to the work of the Consortium of Appalachian Fire Managers and...

The last decade saw a dramatic proliferation of software systems intended to help fire and fuels managers in the United States. Funding for these software systems came from a variety of sources without any central control or vision. A governance process with stated requirements on how to transition a research-grade software application to an operationally ready one was never created. This resulted in a fuels management environment with numerous, fragmented, stand-alone tools; system and data access issues; decentralized planning and support; minimal security; and ad-hoc training

The George Washington and Jefferson National Forests (GWJNF) in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy began planning a monitoring program utilizing adaptive management methods to guide prescribed burning in 2008. The development of a successful monitoring program requires extensive research, planning, and cooperation between fire management officers and ecologists to establish measurable burn objectives. Working together, the GWJNF and The Nature Conservancy developed monitoring protocols then utilized the database Feat and Firemon Integrated (FFI), free software developed by the...

Prescribed fire is used widely to mitigate wildfires and restore ecosystems. However, there are few tools developed to evaluate fire’s cumulative impact, calculate frequency, examine seasonality, and estimate fuel accumulation to facilitate decisionmaking in targeting successive prescribed fire application. An ESRI shapefile of all wildfire and prescribed fire events was assimilated from 1978 to 2012 for the 235,000-acre Talladega Division in east central Alabama. A python script-based tool was developed for ArcGIS10 to calculate the annualized average fire return interval, years of fuel...