Treesearch

What plants can survive fire, can displace native plants, and are difficult to manage? Among others are these eight nonnative species in the western United States: buffelgrass, cutleaf blackberry, diffuse knapweed, Himalayan blackberry, Sahara mustard, spotted knapweed, ventenata, and yellow starthistle. Unfortunately, one of the reasons that invasive plants are so hard to manage is because there is no one-size-fits-all approach—each species has its own tricks enabling it to thrive and wreak havoc.

Forest restoration, here understood as bringing back forests where once they stood, has gained major attention in multiple international forums (Erbaugh et al. 2020). The area of restored forests has increased dramatically since the mid- 20th century. For instance, the global area of planted forests has increased from 65 Mha around the early 1960s to close to 300 Mha in 2020 (de Jong et al. 2021; FAO 2020).

Since the 1940s, the USDA Forest Service has surveyed roundwood receiving facilities to report on timber products output (TPO). The TPO program provides information on forest removals, processing capacity, and wood product markets, complementing inventory estimates of status and change. The program adopted an annual state-level probability sampling design in 2019 and this research evaluates rates of unit nonresponse (UN) in surveys of eleven western states over reference years 2019–2021. The overall response rate for this region and period was 43.7%, which appears low relative to prior...

Spaceborne lidar provides a unique opportunity to supplement the field plot measurements of national forest inventories (NFIs) by providing dense measurements of vertical canopy structure. For full waveform instruments such as the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), measurements take the form of reflected energy as a function of height within an observed footprint. Many forest attributes cannot be directly computed from the waveforms, and thus statistical models relating the measurements to target attributes must be trained using field plot data. Because the discrete footprint...

Background: Western forests in the United States are facing multiple threats that have the potential to permanently alter forest composition and structure. In particular, wildfire can either have beneficial or adverse effects on overall forest health and resilience. Monitoring and assessing the effectiveness of existing forest treatment plans for meeting forest management goals is becoming more critical to increase the capacity for managers to prepare for and accommodate uncertainty associated with changing disturbance regimes. We used a combination of fine-scale vegetation and microclimate...

Research on human-elephant interactions (HEI) seeks to better understand relationships between people and elephants with the goal of reducing unwanted interactions for the long-term survival of elephants in social-ecological systems. Many examinations of HEI often rely on a short temporal scale of several seasons to several years, often because of limited data availability across time. These examinations offer limited understanding of processes that influence HEI and mutual adaptations of people and elephants. In this synthesis, I present an ethnographic case study from the Okavango Delta,...

The Yurok Tribe, along with other tribal communities in northwest California, non-profit organizations, universities, and governmental agencies are working to restore forests and woodlands to be more resilient to wildfires, drought, pests and diseases. Our current work within ancestral Yurok territory is designing and evaluating effects of forest treatments including fuels reduction, tree harvesting, and intentional burning based upon indigenous knowledge and associated traditional stewardship practices. Central to these evaluations are the potential availability, quantity, and quality of...

As a journal dedicated to the conservation of California native plants, Artemisia fits the niche of being part science, and part philosophy of appreciation for native California flora and landscapes. In the midst of global recognition of the role Indigenous Peoples play in conserving and stewarding biodiversity, the California Native Plant Society engaged Native American practitioners, researchers, and allies to contribute perspectives on native plants and climate change. As the authors collectively reflect on their contributions, the stories that emerge do in fact illustrate the challenges...

This article shares Karuk cultural practitioner and academic researcher observations of heat and water stress on culturally significant species in the middle Klamath River Basin, as well as co-developed botanical monitoring and education approaches to support adaption and resilience of forests, plants and people to climate change. In doing so, we bring attention to the dire circumstances posed by the “new normal” of environmental change, as a climate crisis as well as the adaptive capacity of Indigenous plant gathering and stewardship to the growing climate crisis. Over three years, the...

Genetic rescue - an increase in population fitness following the introduction of new alleles - has been proven to ameliorate inbreeding depression in small, isolated populations, yet is rarely applied as a conservation tool. A lingering question regarding genetic rescue in wildlife conservation is how long beneficial effects persist in admixed populations. Using data collected over 40 years from 1192 endangered Florida panthers (Puma concolor coryi) across nine generations, we show that the experimental genetic rescue implemented in 1995 - via the release of eight female pumas from Texas -...