Treesearch

Aim To provide the first regional analysis of contemporary drivers of Pacific Island fire regimes. Location Islands of Palau, Yap, Guam, Rota, Tinian, Saipan, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae. Time Period 1950-present. Methods We used land cover, soil maps and contemporary fire histories to (1) describe the relationships among fire activity, vegetation, rainfall and island geography and population; (2) examine the spatial associations of forest and savanna vegetation with respect to fire and soil types; and (3) link fire and savanna distribution to intra-annual and inter-annual rainfall variability....

The decline in amphibian populations is one of the starkest examples of the biodiversity crisis. For stream breeding amphibians, alterations to natural flow regimes by dams, water diversions, and climate change have been implicated in declines and extirpations. Identifying drivers of amphibian declines requires long time series of abundance data because amphibian populations can exhibit high natural variability. Multiple population viability analysis (MPVA) models integrate abundance data and share information from different populations to estimate how environmental factors influence...

Rapid environmental changes—in climate, land use, and biotic interactions—are accelerating species extinctions and extirpations globally. Identifying drivers that threaten populations is essential for conservation yet can be difficult given the variable nature of the response of an organism to biotic and abiotic stressors. We analyzed a long-term monitoring data set to explore demographic responses of fishers (Pekania pennanti) to rapid environmental change in the southern Sierra Nevada, California, United States. Fisher survival was sensitive to both biotic and abiotic factors, although...

Introduction: Forest landscapes offer resources and ecosystem services that are vital to the social, economic, and cultural well-being of human communities, but managing for these provisions can require socially and ecologically relevant trade-offs. We designed a spatial decision support model to reveal trade-offs and synergies between ecosystem services in a large eastern Cascade Mountain landscape in Washington State, USA. Methods: We used process-based forest landscape (LANDIS-II) and hydrology (DHSVM) models to compare outcomes associated with 100 years of simulated forest and wildfire...

For temperate-zone mammals, seasonal changes in weather and food availability often govern energy allocation. In addition, energy allocation strategies usually differ between males and females. Bats are an interesting group in which to evaluate energetic trade-offs as they are highly mobile and lead energetically demanding lives in habitats across a variety of seasonally variable climates. We evaluated year-round changes in body mass and fuel load for three species of bats in northern California: Silver-haired Bat (Lasionycteris noctivagans), California Myotis (Myotis californicus), and...

Forest trees are beleaguered by the ever-increasing onslaught of invasive pests and pathogens, with some species in danger of functional extinction. Recent successes in developing resistant populations using traditional tree breeding assures that some of the affected species will persist in future forests. However, the sheer number of threatened species requires increases in breeding efficiency. The time is right to consider how the use of genomic resources might aid breeding efforts in the next 20 years. Any operational benefit of genomic resources will be minimal without closer collaborat...

The National Climate Assessment is conducted every four years summarizing the impacts of climate change on the US, now and into the future. The fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) contains over thirty chapters spanning topics from water, forests and human health to many regionally focused chapters such as the Northwest and Southeast. Over 300 technical experts produce this report. Because good air quality is vital to human health and the environment, Air Quality is one of the chapters and it has five focus sections; changes in ozone and PM2.5, protecting people from wildfire smoke,...

The year 2021 witnessed the strong recovery of the sawn hardwood market. This positive trend lasted until mid-2022, when it flipped in the entire UNECE region. Consumption of sawn hardwood dropped in the second half of 2022 resulting in the contraction of annual consumption by 3.3% to 30.3 million m3. Consequently, sawn hardwood markets in the UNECE dropped back almost to the low levels of 2020 which was heavily impacted by the pandemic. Sawn hardwood production in the UNECE region dropped by 2.7% to 35.5 million m3.

What could be better than spending a long weekend botanizing in the cold desert ecosystem of Millard County, UT? How about doing so with over thirty other botanical enthusiasts! We did exactly that at the first annual Intermountain Botanical Foray this June. The Foray is a new program organized out of the Intermountain Herbarium at Utah State University: Each year we will coordinate a botany trip that is open to botanists of all types and levels of experience. We will visit a different region of the Intermountain West each year to document the local flora and build community among botanists.

Height-diameter relationship models, denoted as H-D models, have important applications in sustainable forest management which include studying the vertical structure of a forest stand, understanding the habitat heterogeneity for wildlife niches, analyzing the growth rate pattern for making decisions regarding silvicultural treatments. Compared to monocultures, characterizing allometric relationships for uneven-aged, mixed-species forests, especially tropical forests, is more challenging and has historically received less attention. Modeling how the competitive interactions between trees...