Treesearch

We introduce a probabilistic framework for vulnerability analysis and use it to quantify current and future vulnerability of the US water supply system. We also determine the contributions of hydro-climatic and socio-economic drivers to the changes in projected vulnerability. For all scenarios and global climatemodels examined, the US Southwest including California and the southern Great Plains was consistently found to be the most vulnerable. For most of the US, the largest contributions to changes in vulnerability come from changes in supply. However, for some areas of the West changes...

Wilderness social science has changed over the 50 years since passage of the Wilderness Act. This research was initially heavily influenced by the need to operationalize definitions contained in the Wilderness Act, the desire to report use levels, and the need for better understanding of the important values American people attached to wilderness. Over the past three decades, however, wilderness science was guided by new questions asked by managers due to changes in society, technology, and use patterns. Scientists have collaborated with managers to provide solutions to changing science...

This is a time of explosive growth in the fields of evolutionary and population genetics, with whole genome sequencing and bioinformatics driving a transformative paradigm shift (Morozova and Marra, 2008). At the same time, advances in epigenetics are thoroughly transforming our understanding of evolutionary processes and their implications for populations, species and communities (Callinan and Feinberg, 2006). These revolutionary changes present tremendous opportunities and challenges to our field (Table 1). In this essay, I will lay out my personal interpretation of what some of the...

Conservation planners and land managers are often confronted with scale-associated challenges when assessing the relationship between land management objectives and species conservation. Conservation of individual species typically involves site-level analyses of habitat, whereas land management focuses on larger spatial extents. New models are needed to more explicitly integrate species-specific conservation with landscape or regional scales. We address this challenge with an example using the northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis), a forest raptor with circumpolar distribution that is the...

Air pollution in Santiago is a serious problem every winter, causing thousands of cases of breathing problems within the population. With more than 6 million people and almost two million vehicles, this large city receives rainfall only during winters. Depending on the frequency of storms, statistics show that every time it rains, air quality improves for a couple of days, followed by extreme levels of air pollution. Current regulations focus mostly on PM10 and PM2.5, due to its strong influence on respiratory diseases. Though more than 50% of the ambient PM10s in Santiago is represented...

Forests occur within urban areas, at the interface between urban and rural areas (wildland-urban interface), and in rural areas. Urban forests contribute to clean air, cooling buildings, aesthetics, and recreation in parks. Development in the wildland-urban interface is increasing because of the appeal of owning homes near or in the woods. In rural areas, market factors drive land uses among commercial forestry and land uses such as agriculture. Across this spectrum, forests provide recreational opportunities, cultural resources, and social values such as aesthetics.

Wildland-urban interface (WUI) homeowners who do not mitigate the wildfire risk on their properties impose a negative externality on society. To reduce the social costs of wildfire and incentivise homeowners to take action, cost sharing programs seek to reduce the barriers that impede wildfire risk mitigation. Using survey data from a WUI community in western Colorado and a two-stage decision framework, we examine residents' willingness to participate in a cost sharing program for removing vegetation on their properties and the amount they are willing to contribute to the cost of that...

Groundwater is connected to the landscape above and is thus affected by the overlaying land uses. This study evaluated the impacts of land uses upon groundwater quality using trilinear analysis. Trilinear analysis is a display of experimental data in a triangular graph. Groundwater quality data collected from agricultural, septic tank, forest, and wastewater land uses for a 6-year period were used for the analysis. Results showed that among the three nitrogen species (i.e., nitrate and nitrite (NOx), dissolved organic nitrogen (DON), and total organic nitrogen (TON)), NOx had a high...

An inexpensive, rapid method for measuring the rheological properties of yield stress fluids is described and tested. The method uses an auger that does not rotate during measurements, and avoids material and instrument-related difficulties, for example, wall slip and the presence of large particles, associated with yield stress fluids. The method can be used for many types of yield stress fluids, including concentrated lignocellulosic biomass. Sample preparation prior to measurement is minimal, reducing, or eliminating disruption of the sample. We show that measurements using this...

The hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) (Adelges tsugae Annand) is a destructive, non-native pest of forest and ornamental hemlock trees in eastern North America. It was first collected in the eastern United States in 1951 in Richmond, Virginia, arriving sometime earlier directly from southern Japan, probably on live plant material. Other than its new association with eastern and Carolina hemlock, HWA has been historically associated with hemlock species in western North America and Asia. The geographic range of eastern hemlock extends from the Canadian Maritime Provinces, west to the Great Lakes...