Treesearch

We develop the idea of risk transmission from large wildfires and apply network analyses to understand its importance on a 0.75 million ha US national forest. Wildfires in the western US frequently burn over long distances (e.g., 20–50 km) through highly fragmented landscapes with respect to ownership, fuels, management intensity, population density, and ecological conditions. The collective arrangement of fuel loadings in concert with weather and suppression efforts ultimately determines containment and the resulting fire perimeter. While spatial interactions among land parcels in terms...

As carbon modeling tools become more comprehensive, spatial data are needed to improve quantitative maps of carbon emissions from fire. The Wildland Fire Emissions Information System (WFEIS) provides mapped estimates of carbon emissions from historical forest fires in the United States through a web browser. WFEIS improves access to data and provides a consistent approach to estimating emissions at landscape, regional, and continental scales. The system taps into data and tools developed by the U.S. Forest Service to describe fuels, fuel loadings, and fuel consumption and merges information...

Atmospherically deposited sulfur (S) causes stream water acidification throughout the eastern U.S. Southern Appalachian Mountain (SAM) region. Acidification has been linked with reduced fitness and richness of aquatic species and changes to benthic communities. Maintaining acid-base chemistry that supports native biota depends largely on balancing acidic deposition with the natural resupply of base cations. Stream water acid neutralizing capacity (ANC) is maintained by base cations that mostly originate from weathering of surrounding lithologies. When ambient atmospheric S deposition...

Little is known about the ecological relationships of bats of Southcentral Alaska. We used AnaBat II bat detectors, mist-netting, and radio-telemetry to collect preliminary data on the distribution and status of bats on the Chugach National Forest (CNF), their activity patterns, and their roosting and foraging habitats. Myotis spp. were detected at 20 of 25 acoustic sampling sites. Bat activity tended to be higher at water sites than at road or trail sites, and higher in hardwood stands than in conifer stands, although these differences were not statistically significant. Based on data...

In December 2013, I (RAH) received an interesting Email message from Claus Eckelmann, who works out of Barbados as the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) Forestry Officer for the Caribbean, informing me about a possible bark beetle outbreak in the pine forests of The Bahamas.

The average annual percentage rates of change in real sawtimber stumpage prices from 1978 through 2012 (dollars per thousand board feet, Doyle) for the 10 commercial hardwood species of Ohio were determined. Each species was then further examined for differing trend lines between the spring and fall reporting periods. Annual real rates of change ranged from -1.10 percent for basswood to 2.13 percent for hard maple. Across species, 37 percent of the annual price highs occurred in spring; 59 percent of the annual highs occurred in fall. Approximately 75 percent of all price cycles lasted...

Northern red oak (Quercus rubra) grows across much of Wisconsin. Using site factors to aid in prediction of volume and basal area increment facilitates management of red oak and other species of interest. Currently, habitat type (Wisconsin Habitat Type Classification System) is often determined when stands are inventoried. If habitat type were strongly related to annual volume and basal area increment, it would be a valuable tool in making management decisions. The objective of this study was to determine if individual tree annual volume and basal area increment (last 20 years) of northern...

Differences in composition, structure, and growth under canopy gaps created by the mortality of a single stem were analyzed using analysis of variance under two scenarios, with stem removed or with stem left as a standing snag. There were no significant differences in composition and structure of large diameter residual stems within upper canopy strata. Some preexisting advance regeneration was recruited as a new cohort following the disturbance. On cut plots, the recruitment consisted of eastern white pine (Pinus strobus), yellow-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), and red maple (Acer...

Compositional and structural changes in response to silvicultural treatments in forest stands are well documented (e.g., Saunders and Wagner 2008), but the stochastic nature of natural disturbance events often precludes direct observation of their impacts on stand dynamics. Though the current dominance of oak-hickory forest types in the Central Hardwoods Forest region (CHFR) has been largely attributed to anthropogenic disturbance, some have postulated that periodic severe droughts may also have limited the dominance of more vigorous competitors. Morrisey et al. (2008), for example, found...