Treesearch

The number of wildland-urban interface communities affected by wildfire is increasing, and both wildfire suppression and losses are costly. However, little is known about post-wildfire response by homeowners and communities after buildings are lost. Our goal was to characterise rebuilding and new development after wildfires across the conterminous United States. We analysed all wildfires in the conterminous USA from 2000 to 2005. We mapped 42 724 buildings, of which 34 836 were present before the fire and survived, 3604 were burned, 2403 were post-fire new development, and 1881 were burned...

In pest risk assessment it is frequently necessary to make time-critical decisions regarding management of expanding pest populations. When an invasive pest outbreak is expanding rapidly, preemptive quarantine of areas that are under imminent threat of infestation is one of only a few available management tools that can be implemented quickly to help control the expansion. The preemptive quarantine of locations that surround an infested area also acts as a safeguard to counteract the risk of failed detections of the pest in field surveys. In this paper, we present a method that assesses...

The concept of a trade-off of tree resources between growth and defense is readily grasped. The most detailed development of the concept is for the growth-differentiation balance hypothesis that predicts that resources for normal growth and primary metabolism are diverted to support plant defense and secondary or stress metabolism. This hypothesis has been applied to the biosynthetic cost of stress metabolites that protect wood and foliage from herbivory. This review suggests that the trade-offs of primary to stress metabolism is an ongoing theme throughout the evolution of land plants....

The climate record of Priest River Experimental Forest has the potential to provide a century-long history of northern Rocky Mountain forest ecosystems. The record, which began in 1911 with the Benton Flat Nursery control weather station, included observations of temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind. Later, other observations stations were added to the network and observations were expanded to include snow courses and streamflow measurements. The region contains nearly all of the dominant forest types within the northern Rocky Mountains, from the xeric ponderosa pine forest type,...

Active management techniques that emulate natural forest disturbance and stand development processes have the potential to enhance species diversity, structural complexity, and spatial heterogeneity in managed forests, helping to meet goals related to biodiversity, ecosystem health, and forest resilience in the face of uncertain future conditions. There are a number of steps to complete before, during, and after deciding to use active management for this purpose. These steps include specifying objectives and identifying initial targets, recognizing and addressing contemporary stressors...

Long-term landscape-scale experiments allow for the detection of effects of silviculture on bird abundance. Manipulative studies allow for strong inference on effects and confirmation of patterns from observational studies.We estimated bird-territory density within forest stands (2.89-62 ha) for 19 years of the Missouri Ozark Forest Ecosystem Project (MOFEP), a 100-year experiment designed to study the effects of even-age and uneven-age management on wildlife. We spot-mapped territories of 15 species in 228 stands for 5 years before treatment and 14 years after treatment to assess the...

Downed dead wood (DDW) in forest ecosystems is a C pool whose net flux is governed by a complex of natural and anthropogenic processes and is critical to the management of the entire forest C pool. As empirical examination of DDW C net flux has rarely been conducted across large scales, the goal of this study was to use a remeasured inventory of DDW C and ancillary forest attributes to assess C net flux across forests of the Eastern US. Stocks associated with large fine woody debris (diameter 2.6-7.6 cm) decreased over time (-0.11 Mg ha-1 year-1), while stocks of larger-sized coarse DDW...

Do qualitative classifications of ecological conditions for harvesting culturally important forest plants correspond to quantitative differences among sites? To address this question, we blended scientific methods (SEK) and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) to identify conditions on sites considered good, marginal, or poor for harvesting the leaves of a plant (beargrass; Xerophyllum tenax) used in tribal basket weaving. We relied on voluntary participation of six expert weavers, a stratified, randomized field sample, discriminant analysis (DA), a standardized color system, and paired...

The ignition of woody wildland fuel modeled as a one-dimensional slab subject to various modes of heating was investigated using a general pyrolysis code, Gpyro. The heating mode was varied by applying different convective and/or radiative, time-dependent heat flux boundary conditions on one end of the slab while keeping the other end insulated. Dry wood properties were used for the slab. Initially, wood was treated as chemically inactive and following this it is presumed to decompose via a single-stage kinetic model involving two solid phase species coupled with one gas phase species....

Development time and prey consumption of Scymnus (Neopullus) camptodromus Yu and Liu (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) larvae by instar, strain, and temperature were evaluated. S. camptodromus, a specialist predator of hemlock woolly adelgid Adelges tsugae (Annand) (Hemiptera: Adelgidae), was brought to the United States from China as a potential biological control agent for A. tsugae. This beetle has been approved for removal from quarantine but has not yet been field released. We observed that temperature had significant effects on the predator's life history. The larvae tended to develop...