Treesearch

Acid hydrotropic fractionation using maleic acid, a US FDA approved indirect food additive, can rapidly (20 min) dissolve wood lignin at low temperatures (70–110 ◦C). This study characterized the physical and chemical properties, i.e., color, molecular weight, solubility, and chemical structure of maleic acid hydrotropic fractionation dissolved wood lignin (MAHL) obtained under various fractionation conditions. The study also demonstrated valorization of MAHL for two polymeric applications through direct mixing with (1) commercial sunscreen for its light color and UV protection capability,...

Climate change is driving unprecedented declines in dominant, habitat-forming foundation species across marine and terrestrial ecosystems globally. As climatic novelty becomes the norm, ecosystem reassembly will become increasingly common. Predicting and understanding these transitions, and their implications for future ecosystem functioning, is essential for designing effective forward-looking management strategies. We explored 3 scenarios that describe a range of ecosystem reassembly trajectories following declines in previously dominant habitat-forming taxa: compensation, in which...

Despite a growing need to expand the pace and scale of prescribed burning to address the national fire deficit, there is a lack of data-driven methods to incorporate fire danger information into prescribed fire planning. We assembled nearly two decades of prescribed fire and wildfire records across Montana and Idaho and combined these records with spatially explicit fire danger data. We implement a nonparametric cutpoint analysis to identify objective thresholds from the Energy Release Component (ERC) percentile, treating pile burns, broadcast burns, and wildfires as ordinal classes along...

Next-generation models of fire behavior and smoke production rely on gridded, 3D inputs of wildland fuel complexes. We used a hierarchically scaled sampling design to characterize canopy and surface fuels that are common to prescribed burning programs in the southeastern and western US. Sampling included airborne laser scanning, terrestrial laser scanning, close-range photogrammetry, and destructive field sampling. The objective of this study was to use a combination of airborne laser scanning (ALS), terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), structure-from-motion photogrammetry (SfM), and field...

Reliable resilience indicators are urgently needed to monitor global forest health under increasing climate stress. Lag-1 temporal autocorrelation (TAC) of satellite vegetation indices captures forest recovery speed and is widely used as a resilience metric, but its mechanistic underpinnings and methodological reliability have been questioned. Here we use Landsat observations and field data from the Amazon to investigate how satellite-derived TAC relates to in situ measurements of the hydraulic safety margin (HSM), a key physiological trait for plants’ capacity to accommodate drier...

Rising timber demand is transforming forest structure globally, profoundly affecting biodiversity and climate resilience. Logging‐driven fragmentation is potentially a major driver of biodiversity loss in production landscapes, yet its interactions with escalating climate stressors remain poorly understood.We combine two decades of Landsat‐derived habitat metrics with 29,000 surveys of the marbled murrelet ( Brachyramphus marmoratus )—an iconic Pacific Northwest old‐forest specialist seabird affecting management of >10 million hectares. Controlling for habitat amount and detection probabili...

The dataset is a spatially and temporally organized curated subset of National Infrared Operations Program real-time high-resolution fire perimeter acquisitions for the Western United States from 2020 to 2024. The U.S. Forest Service’s National Infrared Operations is an ordered resource that flies only when requested and prioritized, and which tracks and documents wildfire progression over time. Through a structured data retrieval, consolidation, and metadata curation process, the dataset organizes fire perimeters and associated attributes to facilitate the temporal and spatial reconstructi...

Understanding seasonal water budgets of wildlife is critical, as climate change alters water availability. Rocky Mountain mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus hemionus) mainly obtain water from their diet and drinking water; however, winter access to these resources varies with snow cover. To assess reliance on water sources by mule deer during winter, we longitudinally sampled female deer in Utah’s Bear River Mountains, a montane region with deep snow and ample drinking water sources, and Pine Valley, a semiarid region with little snow. We implanted physiological biologgers to record heart rate...

Context Wildlife responses to disturbance may include physiological stress responses that are often difficult to observe yet important for wildlife health. Coupling physiological biologgers with tracking data can identify anthropogenic features associated with stress responses. Diagnosing when, where, and the response to stressors, along with how species may habituate or sensitize to stressors over time, is crucial for conservation efforts. Objectives We examined if mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) exhibited acute stress responses to road crossings, identified the road features and contexts...

Droughts are intensifying across the biosphere, yet the consequences of this phenomenon for wildlife habitat suitability and fitness are poorly studied. We analyzed 12 years of GPS telemetry data for three large mammal species—herbivorous mule deer ( N = 2854), omnivorous black bears ( N = 103), and carnivorous cougars ( N = 105)—to evaluate the effects of drought on each species’ habitat selection across a 500,000-km 2 aridity gradient in the interior West, USA. Additionally, we evaluated interannual variation in mule deer reproduction as a function of drought intensity. Severe drought...