Treesearch

Herbivore-driven changes to soil properties can influence the decomposition rate of organic material and therefore soil carbon cycling within grassland ecosystems. We investigated how aboveground foraging mammalian and invertebrate herbivores affect mineral soil decomposition rates and associated soil properties in two subalpine vegetation types (shortgrass and tall-grass) with different grazing histories.

Questions: Do fuel models developed for North American fuel types accurately represent fuel beds found in grass-invaded tropical shrublands? Do standard or custom fuel models for firebehavior models with in situ or RAWS measured fuel moistures affect the accuracy of predicted fire behavior in grass-invaded tropical shrublands? Location: Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, Island of Hawai’i, Hawai’i, USA. Methods: Fuel loads of coarse woody debris, live herbaceous and live woody fuel loads were quantified with Brown’s transects and biomass sampling to create a custom fuel model for nonnative...

Background: The dynamics of gaps plays a role in the regimes of tree mortality, production of coarse woody debris (CWD) and the variability of light in the forest understory. Aims: To quantify the area affected by, and the carbon fluxes associated with, natural gap-phase disturbances in a tropical lowland evergreen rain forest by use of ground measurements and high-resolution satellite images. Methods:We surveyed two large forest inventory plots of 114 and 53 ha of the Tapajós National Forest (TNF) in the Brazilian Amazon during 2008 and 2009, respectively. We mapped all gaps and collected...

The identification of insecticide residues on crop foliage is needed to make periodic pest management decisions. Electronic-nose (e-nose) methods were developed and tested as a means of acquiring rapid identifications of insecticide residue types at relatively low cost by detection of headspace volatiles released from inert surfaces in vitro. Detection methods were developed for an intrinsically conducting polymer (CP)-type electronic nose gas-sensing device, the Aromascan A32S, to identify and discriminate among eleven insecticides representing eight different classes. A vapor library was...

The year 1992 was a watershed for research on place attachment. Not only was the landmark book Place Attachment (Altman & Low, 1992) published, in that same year some colleagues and I published "Beyond the Commodity Metaphor" in the journal Leisure Sciences (Williams et al., 1992). Our paper was not intended as a methodological contribution to place attachment measurement. Rather it was an effort to reframe the study of outdoor recreation experiences around the notion of "relationship to place" as an alternative to modeling it as a multiattribute consumer choice, or what we called "the...

Increasing wildfire activity in recent decades, partially related to extended droughts, along with concern over potential impacts of future climate change on fire activity has resulted in increased attention on fire–climate interactions. Findings from studies published in recent years have remarkably increased our understanding of fire–climate interactions and improved our capacity to delineate probable future climate change and impacts. Fires are projected to increase in many regions of the globe under a changing climate due to the greenhouse effect. Burned areas in the western US could...

Limber pine (Pinus flexilis) is being threatened by the lethal disease white pine blister rust caused by the non-native pathogen Cronartium ribicola. The types and frequencies of genetic resistance to the rust will likely determine the potential success of restoration or proactive measures. These first extensive inoculation trials using individual tree seed collections from over 100 limber pine trees confirm: genetic segregation of a stem symptom-free trait to blister rust that is consistent with inheritance by a single dominant R gene and the resistance allele appears to be distinct from...

Cofiring forest biomass residues with coal to generate electricity is often cited for its potential to offset fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the extent to which cofiring achieves these objectives is highly dependent on case specific variables. This paper uses facility and forest specific data to examine emissions from cofiring forest biomass with coal ranging up to 20% substitution by heat value in southwest Colorado, USA. Calculations for net system emissions include five emissions sources: coal mining, power plant processes, forest biomass processes, boiler...

An annotated bibliography of scientific literature on research and management activities conducted in Tenderfoot Creek Experimental Forest

National-scale analyses of fire occurrence are needed to prioritize fire policy and management activities across the United States. However, the drivers of national-scale patterns of fire occurrence are not well understood, and how the relative importance of human or biophysical factors varies across the country is unclear. Our research goal was to model the drivers of fire occurrence within ecoregions across the conterminous United States. We used generalized linear models to compare the relative influence of human, vegetation, climate, and topographic variables on fire occurrence in the...