Treesearch

Semi-arid forests are in a period of rapid transition as a result of unprecedented landscape scale fires, insect outbreaks, drought, and anthropogenic land use practices. Understanding how historically episodic disturbances led to coherent forest structural and spatial patterns that promoted resilience and resistance is a critical part of addressing change. Here my coauthors and I apply metabolic scaling theory (MST) to examine scaling behavior and structural patterns of semi-arid conifer forests in Arizona and New Mexico. We conceptualize a linkage to mechanistic drivers of forest...

The objective of this study was to examine the potential of acoustic measurement as a rapid and nondestructive method to predict the dimensional stability of young-growth Sitka spruce and western hemlock. Ultrasonic velocity, peak energy, specific gravity, and radial and tangential shrinkages were measured on twenty-four 25- x102- xy 25-mm specimens obtained from a 58-year-old stand in Southeast Alaska. We found that specific gravity and peak energy of ultrasonic signals were not good predictors of transverse shrinkage, as indicated by poor correlations. Ultrasonic velocity, on the other...

Species distribution models (SDMs) were built with US Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) publicly available plot coordinates, which are altered for plot security purposes, and compared with SDMs built with true plot coordinates. Six species endemic to the western US, including four junipers (Juniperus deppeana var. deppeana, J. monosperma, J. occidentalis, J. osteosperma) and two pinons (Pinus edulis, P. monophylla), were analyzed. The presence-absence models based on current climatic variables were generated over a series of species-specific modeling extents using Random Forests and...

Forests provide important habitat for much of the world’s biodiversity, and the continuing global deforestation is one of our greatest environmental concerns. Planted forests represent an increasing proportion of the global forest area and partly compensate for the loss of natural forest in terms of forest area, habitat for biodiversity and ecological function. At current rates, over 30% of the remaining natural forest area will be lost by the end of the century and planted forests would then represent over 20% of the total forest area. This places a greater demand on planted forests to...

Nearly 4 % of the world’s forests are plantations, established to provide a variety of ecosystem services, principally timber and other wood products. In addition to such services, plantation forests provide direct and indirect benefits to biodiversity via the provision of forest habitat for a wide range of species, and by reducing negative impacts on natural forests by offsetting the need to extract resources. There is compelling evidence that climate change is directly affecting biodiversity in forests throughout the world. These impacts occur as a result of changes in temperature,...

En este mapa de investigacion describimos las areas protegidas terrestres de Puerto Rico basado en elementos naturales y antropogenicos del paisaje. Utilizamos datos geoespaciales para calcular la extension y representatividad de elementos del paisaje dentro de las areas protegidas de Puerto Rico, i.e., cobertura del terreno (Gould et al. 2007), asentamientos urbanos, suburbanos y rurales (Martinuzzi et al. 2008), y fisiografia general. Las graficas circulares y de barra muestran la distribucion y el nivel de proteccion de cada uno de los elementos analizados. En adicion, analizamos el...

Large, severe fires are ecologically and socially important because they have lasting effects on vegetation and soils, can potentially threaten people and property, and can be costly to manage. The goals of the Fire Severity Mapping Project (FIRESEV), which covers lands in the continental western United States, are to understand where and why fires burn severely, and to give fire managers, fire ecologists, and natural resource managers tools to assess severity before, during, and after a wildfire. FIRESEV has produced a suite of tools for a wide range of fire management applications,...

New home building in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) continues unabated, despite the high financial and human costs of fighting fires in these areas. The goal of this research is to understand, through surveys and expert assessments, the attitudes and perceptions of WUI homeowners as they relate to taking action to reduce wildfire risk on their property. It also addresses whether there is a difference between their perceptions of the wildfire risk on their property and an expert’s assessment. In a two-county survey in Colorado, it was found that the most important sources of information...

In the coming decades, population growth, economic growth, and associated land-use changes - in concert with climate change - will influence forests and rangelands in the Interior West. Society’s demand for ecosystem goods and services continues to increase as human and biophysical change alter the productive capacity of these lands. The 2010 RPA Assessment uses scenario-based socioeconomic and climatic projections to analyze these natural resource trends. Geographic variation throughout the Interior West will determine local trends, but regional trends project population growth around...

Western white pine (Pinus monticola) is a species that used to dominate the forests of the Interior Northwest prior to the expansion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the late 19th century. Its foundational role contributed to a landscape that was resilient, fire-adapted, and provided abundant suitable habitat for terrestrial and aquatic species. However, substantial harvesting and the early 20th century introduction of the invasive fungal pathogen that causes white pine blister rust disease combined with other factors to fundamentally alter the forested landscape of the Interior...