Treesearch

Woody debris decay rates have recently received much attention because of the need to quantify temporal changes in forest carbon stocks. Published decay rates, available for many species, are commonly used to characterize deadwood biomass and carbon depletion. However, decay rates are often derived from reductions in wood density through time, which when used to model biomass and carbon depletion are known to underestimate rate loss because they fail to account for volume reduction (changes in log shape) as decay progresses. We present a method for estimating changes in log volume through...

The Trinity River Restoration Program began in 2000 with the goal of restoring the Trinity River's salmon and steelhead fisheries, which were severely degraded during the last half-century as a result of dams, water diversions under the Central Valley Project, and land-use practices such as gold mining. The restoration program, as outlined in the U.S. Department of the Interior's Record of Decision (2000), was founded to restore the fisheries by restoring features of a healthy alluvial river system, such as spring floods, river channel complexity, and gravel spawning habitat.

In this paper, we investigate homeowner preferences and willingness to pay for wildfire protection programs using a choice experiment with three attributes: risk, loss and cost. Preference heterogeneity among survey respondents was examined using three econometric models and risk preferences were evaluated by comparing willingness to pay for wildfire protection programs against expected monetary losses. The results showed that while nearly all respondents had risk seeking preferences, a small segment of respondents were risk neutral or risk averse. Only respondents who had personal...

This report describes the database used to compile, store, and manage intensive ground-based biometric data collected at research sites in Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Wyoming, supporting research activities of the U.S. North American Carbon Program (NACP). This report also provides details of each site, the sampling design and collection standards for biometric measurements, the database design, data summary examples, and the uses of intensive ground-based biometric data. Additional information on location descriptions, data, databases, and documentat...

The critical role of forests in the global carbon cycle is well known, but significant uncertainties remain about the specific role of disturbance, in part because of the challenge of incorporating spatial and temporal detail in the characterization of disturbance processes. In this study, we link forest inventory data to remote sensing data to derive estimates of pre- and post-disturbance biomass, and then use near-annual remote sensing observations of forest disturbance to characterize biomass loss associated with disturbance across the conterminous U.S. between 1986 and 2004. Nationally,...

Discriminant analysis, referred to as maximum likelihood classification within popular remote sensing software packages, is a common supervised technique used by analysts. Polytomous logistic regression (PLR), also referred to as multinomial logistic regression, is an alternative classification approach that is less restrictive, more flexible, and easy to interpret. To assess the utility of PLR in image classification, we compared the results of 15 classifications using independent validation datasets, estimates of kappa and error, and a non-parametric analysis of variance derived from...

The rust fungus, Puccinia psidii, is a devastating pathogen of introduced eucalypts (Eucalyptus spp.) in Brazil where it was first observed in 1912. This pathogen is hypothesized to be endemic to South and Central America and to have first infected eucalypts via a host jump from native guava (Psidium guajava). Ten microsatellite markers were used to genotype 148 P. psidii samples from eucalypts and guava plus five additional myrtaceous hosts across a wide geographic range of south-eastern Brazil and Uruguay. Principal coordinates analysis, a Bayesian clustering analysis and a minimum-spanni...

This report traces the flow of Montana’s 2009 timber harvest through the primary wood-using industries; provides a description of the structure, capacity, and condition of Montana’s primary forest products industry; and quantifies volumes and uses of wood fiber. Historical wood products industry changes are discussed, as well as changes in harvest, production, employment, and sales.

Recent collapses of population cycles in several species highlight the mutable nature of population behavior as well as the potential role of human-induced environmental change in causing population dynamics to shift. We investigate changes in the cyclicity of gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) outbreaks by applying wavelet analysis to an 86-year time series of forest defoliation in the northeastern United States. Gypsy moth population dynamics shifted on at least four occasions during the study period (1924–2009); strongly cyclical outbreaks were observed between ca. 1943–1965 and ca. 1978–1996...