Treesearch

We identify at-risk amphibians tied to aquatic-riparian habitats in U.S. Pacific Northwest forests for fire-management considerations and synthesize amphibian ecology and fire- and forest-management effects to provide guidance for sustainability of these amphibians during prefire fuel management, active wildfire management, and postfire management activities. We focus on seven amphibian groups that have both state-scale sensitive-species status and modeled viability concerns in regional moist coniferous forests. Chief concerns from both fire and fire management activities for these animals...

For over a century, economic ideas have shaped US public land management. This culminated with ‘maximum sustainable yield’ (MSY) becoming a central decision-making framework. However, the passage of major environmental legislation—echoing an American preservationist tradition—spurred the US Forest Service and other public agencies to reconsider this narrow utilitarian approach, setting the stage for the adoption of a social-ecological systems framework emphasizing ecosystem services and resilience—benefits that are largely public goods—aimed at achieving sustainability. However, a reorienta...

Forest composition and fuel loadings govern wildfire behavior and effects, influencing the vulnerability of forest carbon (C) to emission; however, key uncertainties remain regarding post-fire forest and fuel dynamics and their consequences for C vulnerability to subsequent burns. The objectives of this study were to investigate (1) how forest structure before and after fire compares to the historic natural range of variability; (2) how immediate fire effects and environmental characteristics influence patterns of change in forest structure and biomass over time after fire; and (3) how...

The oak genus (Quercus), originating approximately 56 million years ago in the temperate Americas, has diversified across the Northern Hemisphere. Oaks are integral components of various ecosystems, including temperate deciduous forests, temperate and subtropical evergreen forests, subtropical and tropical savannahs, oak-pine forests, oak-“piñon”-juniper woodlands, cloud forests, tropical premontane and montane forests, matorral (summer rain chaparral), and Mediterranean vegetation. While many species of Quercus are exceptionally large, dominant overstory trees, others exhibit a wide range...

Generating satellite-based deforestation alerts with actionable latency requires frequent imaging, creating an imperative to use different sensors together. We introduce a simple and open-source framework called the Disturbance Index Alert System (DIAS), which is based upon transformation of imagery from different sources into an interoperable stream of Disturbance Index (DI) values. Whereas most alert systems target divergence of forested pixels from historical states, DIAS targets movement of a pixel’s Z-score position relative to the image-wide population of forest pixels along a...

The models that produce most existing forest height maps minimize mean individual prediction errors quantified by metrics such as Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). However, when predictor data do not explain all height variability in the training sample, this objective function leads to prediction toward the mean, distorting population-level prediction of height range and variability. Several existing forest height maps have used training data from NASA's Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) lidar mission, and while the mission's retrievals are subject to measurement error, we used...

Maps of land cover class are more common, and generally more accurate, than maps of land use because “use” implies management intent that may not be directly sensible by earth-observing satellites. However, many monitoring frameworks related to sustainability require land use and land cover to be explicitly differentiated. This is particularly true for forests, where natural and human-caused dynamics in tree cover often occur independently of long-term land use changes that signal deforestation. We used an extensive multi-temporal, multi-variate sample of reference points across the United...

Forest aboveground biomass Density (AGBD) maps provide important constraints on climate and carbon cycle models and enable the long-term monitoring of carbon stocks. NASA's latest spaceborne lidar instruments provide unprecedented observations of forest structure that are used to compile spatially continuous, locally trained maps of circa 2020 AGB density and stock. To address a geographical limitation of the International Space Station deployed GEDI instrument, herein we map high northern latitude forests with a fusion of NASA's ICESat-2 mission, Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS), and...

The four national forests in Southern California are dominated by the chaparral biome and are visited by millions of people annually. These forest ecosystems are impacted by wildfires and drought, which coincide with the peak outdoor recreation season. This study applied a discrete choice experiment to understand visitors’ preferences for site and environmental attributes in wildfire- and drought-induced displacement scenarios. Two surveys were conducted: for a wildfire scenario and a drought scenario. Wildfires create disamenities for recreation through fire damage and smoke exposure,...

The widespread loss of red spruce forests across the central and southern Appalachians during the industrial logging era (1890–1940) inspired nearly a century of land conservation and restoration. This chapter covers the evolution of the restoration movement that began with Civilian Conservation Corpstree plantings in the 1930s, built momentum with the recognition of the loss of endangered species, and has grown through partnerships and supportive policies over the following decades to result in over 2.5 million trees planted and over an estimated 3,200 ha (7,907 ac) treated to accelerate...