Treesearch

Acid rain is one of the most serious ecological and environmental problems worldwide. This study investigated the impacts of simulated acid rain (SAR) upon leaching of trace metals and aluminum (Al) from a soil. Soil pot leaching experiments were performed to investigate the impacts of SAR at five different pH levels (or treatments) over a 34-day period upon the release of trace metals (i.e., Cu, Ni, Pb, Zn, and Fe) and Al from the Latosol (acidic red soil). The concentrations of trace metals in the effluent increased as the SAR pH level decreased, and were highest at the SAR pH = 2.0. In...

My first awareness of the importance that climate has for fish came during my summer field seasons as a Ph.D. student at the University of Wyoming. While conducting electrofishing surveys in the climatically diverse Salt River basin along the mountainous border between Wyoming and Idaho, I observed spatial patterns in species distributions and abundance that strongly paralleled gradients in stream temperature. At the same time, through the research that Dr. Frank Rahel and his students were conducting at the same university, I became aware that climate could change in ways that might have...

As a key component of the cross-border project between Bulgaria and Greece known as OUTLAND, a team from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Rocky Mountain Research Station started a collaborative project to identify and describe various fuel types for a test area in Bulgaria in order to model fire behavior for recent wildfires. Although there have been various efforts to map vegetation in Bulgaria, these datasets have not directly provided the types of data necessary to use the wildfire spread models. This project focuses on using available data sources for Bulgaria including paper maps...

Announcing the release of new software packages for application in wildland fire science and management, two fields that are already fully saturated with computer technology, may seem a bit too much to many managers. However, there have been some recent releases of new computer programs and revisions of existing software and information tools that deserve mention because they constitute a suite of technology that can be used to effectively integrate fire ecology into fire management.

The RxCADRE research team collected multi-scale measurements of pre-, during, and post-fire variables on operational prescribed fires conducted in 2008, 2011, and 2012 in longleaf pine ecosystems in the southeastern USA. Pre- and post-fire surface fuel loads were characterized in alternating pre- and post-fire clip plots systematically established within burn units. Pre- and post-fire surface fuel loads summarized at the plot level were aggregated to estimate absolute consumption (tons/acre) and relative consumption (%) in 28 sample units. Percent cover of green vegetation, non-photosynthet...

Fuel treatments represent a significant component of the wildfire mitigation strategy in the United States. However, the lack of research aimed at quantifying the explicit effectiveness of fuel treatments in reducing wildfire intensity and spread rate limits our ability to make educated decisions about the type and placement of these treatments. As part of a larger project designed to address this knowledge gap, an experiment was conducted in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. This experiment, the first in a set of two, both of which aim to compare bounding levels of fuel treatment, was focused...

Ground-level measurements of fuel loading, fuel consumption, and fuel moisture content were collected on nine research burns conducted at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida in November, 2012. A grass or grass-shrub fuelbed dominated eight of the research blocks; the ninth was a managed longleaf pine (Pinus palustrus) forest. Fuel loading ranged from 1.7 Mg ha-1 on a sparsely vegetated grass site to 19.9 Mg ha-1 on the managed longleaf pine site. Fuel consumption followed suit and was lowest on the sparsely vegetated site (1.1 Mg ha-1) and highest on the forested site (6.7 Mg ha-1). A fuelbed...

In upland hardwood forests of the Southeastern U.S.,prescribed fire is increasingly used by land managers citing objectives that include hazardous fuels reduction, wildlife habitat improvement, promoting oak regeneration, or restoring forest composition or structure to an historic condition. Research suggests that prescribed fire effects on hardwood forests and associated wildlife vary depending on numerous factors, including heat and durtion, forest type, patchiness of fuel, past burning, topography, weather, and season. The appropriate use of prescribed fire as a silvicultural treatment...

Backcross breeding programs have been used to transfer disease resistance and other traits from one forest tree species to another in order to meet restoration objectives. Evaluating the field performance of such material is critical for determining the success of breeding programs. In eastern North America, The American Chestnut Foundation has a backcross breeding program that uses Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima Blume) to introduce resistance of the fungal pathogen chestnut blight [Cryphonectria parasitica (Murr.) Barr.] to the native American chestnut [Castanea dentata (Marsh.)...

In this paper, we used a bedload transport data set collected at North Fork Caspar Creek, California, to examine temporal variation in sediment transport rate over a 7-year period. Using a hierarchical mixed-effects model, we examined across and within-event variation to determine whether the bedload–shear stress relation trends over time. The relation between bedload transport and shear stress was modeled using log(Qb) = α+ β*log(τ) + ε, where α and β are constants and ε is an error term. Depending on the length of observation, α and β can vary over several orders of magnitude, making...