Treesearch

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Arkansas. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all...

Greece is facing a wildfire crisis that parallels many other countries in fire-prone regions around the globe. Recent wildfire data for Greece point to an alarming trend of increasing fire size and severity catalyzed by climate change, lack of forest and fuel management, urban expansion into wildlands around major population centers, and rural exodus from areas that traditionally supported fire-resilient land uses. Fire management in Greece has long emphasized suppression with relatively little attention to prevention and coordination. In this paper, we identify key factors that are...

The unprecedented 2022 wildfire season in Navarra, northern Spain, marked a turning point in regional wildfire management, when seven simultaneous large fires during a June heatwave burned more than 17,000 ha in just a few days, overwhelming suppression capacity and highlighting the limits of a strategy based primarily on ignition prevention and fire suppression. In this study, we implemented a stochastic wildfire modeling system based on the Minimum Travel Time algorithm, historical ignition patterns, spatial fuel data, and spatiotemporal weather variability to assess community and...

A relatively small number of rapidly spreading wildfire events burn disproportionately large areas. But beyond area burned, do fast fires produce distinct postfire ecological outcomes? Here, we measure daily linear fire growth rates and assess relationships between fire spread, burn severity, and metrics of postfire landscape resilience from 3499 fires occurring between 2012 and 2023 in conifer-dominated forests of Canada and the western US. We find that as linear spread rate increases, so too does fire severity, proportion of area burned at high severity, and distance to surviving live...

Background: Changes in climate and vegetation, in combination with fire exclusion, are altering and homogenizing fire regime attributes compared to historical conditions. Fire regime changes are commonly quantified using departure metrics based on differences in measures of central tendency (i.e., means) between time periods. These metrics can mischaracterize complex changes to fire regime attributes because the distributions underlying these attributes are often not well described by parameters.

Results: We developed a non-parametric index of fire regime departure that quantifies...

A condition assessment of several glued-aminated timbers recently removed from service was conducted on the ends of the timbers using stress wave nondestructive evaluation techniques. After the assessment, toughness tests were performed in the laboratory on specimens obtained from the timbers to determine residual strength. Several areas of deterioration from decay were found during the nondestructive assessment. Deterioration was verified during subsequent toughness testing. A statistical relationship was found to exist between nondestructive test measurements and toughness test results.

Springsnails in the genus Pyrgulopsis in western North America have long been a dilemma for taxonomists. Defining species boundaries has been complicated by the presence of undiscovered or cryptic taxa, range over- or underestimation, species complexes representing an unknown number of species, and named species synonymous with other taxa. To address these issues, we conducted an array of molecular species delimitation analyses using sequences from up to 2 mitochondrial and 2 nuclear genes from over 5000 specimens representing 140 of the 151 currently recognized taxa. These analyses...

Maps of aboveground biomass density (AGBD) estimated from remote sensing data with models trained from inventory data are essential for carbon monitoring. Forest inventory plots in the United States (US) are measured by the forest inventory and analysis (FIA) program of the US Forest Service (USFS). These plots are spatially representative, design unbiased, and provide estimates of AGBD and other forest attributes over large spatial domains, but do not provide spatially continuous or sufficiently precise estimates over small spatial domains (e.g. forest stands). Integration with remote...

Congressionally designated wilderness offers the highest level of land protection in the USA, comparable to category 1b wilderness as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, yet wilderness areas face impacts of climate change. Researchers and managers increasingly recognize the immense challenge of stewarding wilderness in a changing climate. Although responding to climate change is considered a wicked problem, this framing has not been applied to wilderness contexts. We move theory into practice by using wicked problem framing and four illustrative cases to explore...

Observed increases in wildfire activity across the contiguous United States (U.S.), together with continued warming and expanding development in fire-prone landscapes, highlight the need to anticipate near-term changes in fire regimes. We apply a Bayesian statistical model that integrates projected population density (SSP2) and downscaled climate simulations under a moderate emissions scenario (RCP 4.5) to estimate future wildfire occurrence, maximum fire size (using the 90th percentile of fire size distribution), and total area burned for large fires (>1000 acres) across all EPA Level III...