Treesearch

The concepts of resilience and resistance (R&R) have been used to improve wildland fuel treatment outcomes by identifying parts of the landscape that are more likely to respond well to treatment. This study examined how the economic benefits and costs of fuel treatments in sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) ecosystems varied with the resilience and resistance properties of the treatment site. Generalized ecological models were developed for the economic analysis of fuel treatments that integrated ecological succession, annual grass invasion, pinyon-juniper expansion, and wildfire to simulate...

Spatially explicit and climate sensitive information on the responses of ecosystems to global change processes is required for strategic planning and prioritization of conservation and restoration. Indicators of ecological resilience and invasion resistance (R&R) are used increasingly to understand the influence of climate on ecosystem responses to these change processes and determine effective management strategies. We developed landscape-scale indicators of R&R based on climate regimes for southwest U.S. drylands that accounted for precipitation seasonality and climate change using 1 km...

Pre-fire mitigation efforts that include the installation and maintenance of fuel breaks are integral to wildfire suppression in Southern California. Fuel breaks alter fire behavior and assist in fire suppression at strategic locations on the landscape. However, the combined effectiveness of fuel breaks and wildfire suppression is not well studied. Using daily firefighting personnel to proxy the quantity and diversity of potential fire suppression operations (i.e., operational complexity), we examined 15 wildfires from 2017 to 2020 in the Los Padres, Angeles, San Bernardino, and Cleveland...

In Elliot and Flanagan (2023), the interrill and rill soil erodibility of 36 cropland soils was reported, along with correlations among soil erodibility and other soil properties, and equations to estimate erodibility from readily measured soil properties. Early versions of the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model had linked interrill detachment rate to the square of the rainfall intensity and an interrill soil erodibility constant Ki1. By the time the WEPP model was released for general use in 1995, the developers had changed the interrill detachment rate to be a function of the...

A study was carried out to compare runoff and erosion from natural rainfall on plots that had been treated with prescribed fire to unburned plots on a sagebrush-steppe rangeland in Southeast Idaho, U.S. Prescribed fire on rangeland sites is intended to maintain healthy shrub-steppe ecosystems but sometimes results in undesirable consequences such as increased runoff and soil erosion. Information is lacking on plot-scale erosion studies from natural precipitation in this ecosystem. Such plot-scale studies are needed to better understand sediment sources (uplands or channels) to support the...

The emerald ash borer (EAB), Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire, is an invasive forest pest that is causing a rapid decline in ash (Fraxinus spp.). As EABs spread across North America to 35 U.S. states and 5 Canadian provinces, detection of the pest has proven difficult, especially at low population density sites. Panel traps have been commonly used in detection and monitoring of EAB populations. Over two sampling periods from 2016 through 2019, adult catches and detection rates were compared among four combinations of panel trap color, lure, and crown placement in southern Arkansas, northern...

City leaders are setting ambitious plans to achieve critical urban sustainability goals such as reducing urban heat, mitigating flooding during storms, and conserving biodiversity, and increasingly rely on urban forests as a key nature-based solution to such challenges. Current paradigms of urban forest management typically prioritize goals like increasing tree canopy cover that are often viewed as proxies for increased ecosystem service provision, in a general sense. However, urban foresters, the professionals with responsibility to manage urban forests, are increasingly faced with the...

Mountain meadows are ecologically important groundwater dependent ecosystems that retain and store water in upland forested landscapes. They tend to occur in low gradient, broad valleys where water slows and sediment accumulates, making them efficient locations for restoration. Over a century and a half of land use has degraded many meadows in the Sierra Nevada, reducing their hydrological and ecological functionality. Process-based restoration (PBR) is an ecosystem rehabilitation approach that utilises biogeomorphic processes to facilitate functional ecosystem recovery. Low-tech applicatio...

This paper provides a comprehensive and comparative analysis of extreme precipitation patterns from 1971 to 2015 in Nepal, a data scarce, but “hot spot” region in global climate change. We compare in‐situ observations and gridded precipitation data from the Asian Precipitation Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Toward Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE). Using 11 precipitation indices, we show that high‐intensity (RX1day, R95pTOT, R99pTOT) and frequency‐related indices (R10 mm, R20 mm) have decreased but annual maximum consecutive dry and wet days have increased. Observati...

Bottomland hardwood wetland forests along the Atlantic Coast of the United States have been changing over time; this change has been exceptionally apparent in the last two decades. Tree mortality is one of the most visually striking changes occurring in these coastal forests today. Using 2009-2019 tree mortality data from a bottomland hardwood forest monitored for long-term flux studies in North Carolina, we evaluated species composition and tree mortality trends and partitioned variance among hydrologic (e.g., sea level rise (SLR), groundwater table depth), biological (leaf area index...