Treesearch

This article describes a nonmarket valuation study about benefits of managing the invasive disease white pine blister rust in highelevation forests in the Western United States. Results demonstrate that, on average, households in the Western United States are willing to pay $154 to improve the resiliency of these forests. Factor analysis shows that long-run protection of the forests dominates recreation in motivating support. Cluster analysis suggests three groups of survey respondents: those indifferent to the program and not willing to pay, those wanting to protect the future of the...

In cold regions, frozen soil has a significant influence on runoff and water erosion. In the U.S. Inland Pacific Northwest, major erosion events typically occur during winter as frozen soil thaws and exhibits low cohesion. Previous applications of the WEPP (Water Erosion Prediction Project) model to a continuous bare tilled fallow (CBF) runoff plot at the Palouse Conservation Field Station (PCFS) in southeastern Washington State showed that WEPP reproduced the occurrence of the large erosion events, but the amount of sediment yield was either under- or overestimated. The inability of WEPP...

At the hillslope profile and/or field scale, a simple Windows graphical user interface (GUI) is available to easily specify the slope, soil, and management inputs for application of the USDA Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model. Likewise, basic small watershed configurations of a few hillslopes and channels can be created and simulated with this GUI. However, as the catchment size increases, the complexity of developing and organizing all WEPP model inputs greatly increases due to the multitude of potential variations in topography, soils, and land management practices. For these...

Use of genetic methods to estimate effective population size (Ne) is rapidly increasing, but all approaches make simplifying assumptions unlikely to be met in real populations. In particular, all assume a single, unstructured population, and none has been evaluated for use with continuously distributed species. We simulated continuous populations with local mating structure, as envisioned by Wright's concept of neighborhood size (NS), and evaluated performance of a single-sample estimator based on linkage disequilibrium (LD), which provides an estimate of the effective number of parents...

Research into post-wildfire effects began in the United Statesmore than 70 years ago and only later extended to other parts of the world. Post-wildfire responses are typically transient, episodic, variable in space and time, dependent on thresholds, and involve multiple processes measured by different methods. These characteristics tend to hinder research progress, but the large empirical knowledge base amassed in different regions of the world suggests that it should now be possible to synthesize the data and make a substantial improvement in the understanding of post-wildfire runoff and...

Aspen (Populus tremuloides) isaniconic species in North American landscapes, highly valued for recreation, fiber, wildlife and livestock forage, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and as a fuelbreak. However, there are rising concerns about the ability of aspen to persist in portions of its range, based on bioclimatic modeling, physiological thresholds and mortality surveys. Our ability to predict and mitigate aspen decline will depend on our understanding of the factors influencing aspen establishment and persistence. Genetic techniques are providing important insights about reproductiv...

Cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs), which are generated from abundant, environmentally friendly natural plant resources, display numerous interesting properties such as outstanding mechanical strength, negligible light scattering, and low thermal expansion (Zimmermann et al., 2010). These nanofibers are usually created by mechanical fibrillation or chemical oxidation of pulp fibers. CNFs have previously been utilized in a broad range of fields, such as special printing, package, medical carriers, filtration, polymeric reinforcement, energy storage, and electronics or display substrates (Siró and...

The natural range of shortleaf pine encompasses 22 states from New York to Texas, second only to eastern white pine in the eastern United States. It is a species of minor and varying occurrence in most of these states usually found in association with other pines, but it is the only naturally occurring pine in the northwestern part of its range in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. Over the whole of this area, it is apparent that shortleaf pine hybridizes with loblolly pine, including areas of species overlap (sympatry) and nonoverlap (allopatry). In this study, we used 25 DNA markers to...

The fire-oak hypothesis asserts that the current lack of fire is a reason behind the widespread oak (Quercus spp.) regeneration difficulties of eastern North America, and use of prescribed burning can help solve this problem. We performed a meta-analysis on the data from 32 prescribed fire studies conducted in mixed-oak forests to test whether they supported the latter assertion. Overall, the results suggested that prescribed fire can contribute to sustaining oak forests in some situations, and we identified several factors key to its successful use. Prescribed fire reduced midstory stem...

In this article, we consider wildfire risk management decisions using a dynamic stochastic model of homeowner interaction in a setting where spatial externalities arise. Our central objective is to apply observations from the social science literature about homeowner preferences to this economic externality problem and determine how assumptions about insurance, information and starting fuel loads affect outcomes and the effectiveness of policy. Three new features of our approach are, first, to assess fuel treatment behavior under potential misinformation scenarios, second, to allow for...