Treesearch

Reliable estimates of population trends are important for prioritizing and implementing wildlife management actions. Abundance estimates are the most informative metric of population status but are difficult and costly to achieve for rare or elusive species. For bat species that are highly mobile and nocturnal, abundance estimates are usually only possible at their roosts. Although they are relatively easy to census in individual roosts, it is often unclear whether observed trends are representative of broader populations trends. Dual-frame sampling is useful for monitoring wildlife...

The California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis) is an older-forest associated species that resides at the center of forest management planning in the Sierra Nevada and Southern California, USA, which are experiencing increasingly large and severe wildfires and drought-related tree mortality. We leveraged advances in passive acoustic survey technologies to develop an acoustically assisted survey design that could increase the efficiency and effectiveness of project-level surveys for spotted owls, allowing surveys to be completed in a single year instead of in multiple years. We...

1. There are concerns over the effects of increasingly large and high-severity fires that burn outside the local natural range of variation on ecosystem services and biodiversity. 2. Pollinators provide important ecosystem services in the dry forests of the western United States where they depend on open habitat created or maintained by frequent, low- to moderate-severity fire. 3. We investigated the impact of burn severity on pollinator diversity in upland forest and meadow habitat at local (i.e., at the plot scale) and regional (burn severity class) spatial scales in the Sierra Nevada of...

Most phytophagous insects are specialists, so availability of suitable host plants often may be a critical factor limiting establishment of non-native insect species. Here we investigate the extent to which established nonnative tree-feeding insects utilize hosts that are native to the invaded range as well as hosts that are themselves non-native. We accomplish this by comparing host use among all native and non-native bark beetles and pinhole borers (Scolytinae and Platypodinae) established in Europe and North America reported in the literature. These groups of insects are well-known for...

Historic atmospheric acidic deposition resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels may alter the pools of important nutrients and base cations in sensitive forest soils. This raises concern that chronic acidic deposition, particularly when coupled with intensive forest biomass harvesting, may diminish long-term soil fertility, forest productivity, and carbon storage potential. To address these concerns, the Fork Mountain long-term soil productivity experiment was initiated in 1996 at the Fernow Experimental Forest, West Virginia. The replicated experimental design consists of 16 plots...

This climate change vulnerability assessment was conducted in support of land management planning for the Pike-San Isabel (PSI) National Forests and Arapaho- Roosevelt (AR) National Forests in the Front Range region of Colorado, USA. Chapters describe climate and climate change and climate change issues relevant to management of water resources and fisheries, forests, wildlife and birds, community engagement, insects and disease, fire risk, infrastructure and flooding, ecosystem services, and recreation. A concluding chapter explores implications and potential adaptation actions for land...

Stretching from Missouri through Arkansas to Georgia and New York and covering 609,000 square kilometers, the Central Hardwoods region is the world’s largest continuous deciduous forested area. Today, most of the forests in the Central Hardwoods region are second-growth forests, meaning that they have been harvested once in the past two centuries. Very few of the forests are old-growth forests, which are defined as uneven-aged forest with trees more than 150 years old and minimal harvesting or manipulation over the last 40 to 100 years.

Native ecosystem and biodiversity loss from land use conversion into human-modified landscapes are evident in the United States and globally. In addition to public land conservation, there is an increase in private land conservation through conservation easements (CEs) across exurban landscapes. Not every CE was established strictly for biodiversity protection and permitted land uses can increase human modification. No research of which we are aware has examined the actual tax assessor's land use designations (LUDs) through time. We constructed granular CE datasets (GCED) of CEs and their...

Cities support abundant human and wildlife populations that are shaped indirectly and directly by human decisions, often resulting in unequal access to environmental services and accessible open spaces. Urban land cover drives biodiversity patterns across metropolitan areas, but at smaller scales that matter to local residents, neighborhood socio-cultural factors can influence the presence and abundance of wildlife. Neighborhood income is associated with plant and animal diversity in some cities, but the influence of other social variables is less well understood, especially across desert...

Public parks are critical urban infrastructures offering health, environmental, social, and cultural benefits to people. However, the idea of park quality has lacked a clear operational definition and normative standard for measurement. We provide critical insights into existing park quality instruments and advocate for an alternative approach. First, due to the significant diversity in parks, inherent ambiguity and subjectivity in the idea of quality, and previous instruments’ inconsistent operationalizations of park quality, we recommend that future research shift its focus from creating...