Treesearch

To make strategic decisions about safety and resource allocation, managers must understand when prescribed burn windows of opportunity occur, how they vary throughout the year, and how to anticipate them. For two burn types—pile and broadcast—we characterize the temporal and spatial distributions of past “go-burn” days identified from a database of 15,468 burn permits from 2011 to 2024 in the Northern California Geographic Area Coordination Center’s region. We assess the mean temporal evolution of daily anomalies of local- and synoptic-scale environmental variables that occurred in the 2...

Burned area and wildfire damages in the western United States (WUS) have increased dramatically in recent decades. Wildfire frequency, however, has shown trends that vary by data set, region, and fire size. Using a comprehensive fire occurrence data set screened for reporting artifacts from 1992 to 2020, we show a significant downward trend in annual fire frequency in WUS, with a significant contribution from decreasing human ignitions. Human‐caused fires significantly declined in California and Arizona, but increased in Wyoming. The relationship between human‐caused fires and population...

The extent of alpine land cover influences the chemistry of streams draining mountain catchments and may determine how they respond to ecosystem change. During the first two decades of the 2000s, the Southern Rockies, USA, experienced both severe bark beetle infestation and significant decreases in atmospheric nitrogen (N) and sulfur (S) deposition. To evaluate the consequences of these events, we compared the chemistry of samples collected during 2004–2006 and 2017–2019 in streams draining 18 headwater catchments comprised of mixtures of forest and alpine land cover. Stream total dissolved...

Have you ever looked at a towering ponderosa pine forest and wondered how old the trees are? Were all the trees of a similar age, known as an “even-aged structure,” such as often results from a reforestation effort where all the seedlings were planted at the same time. Or were there a mixture of young and old trees? That sort of “multi-aged structure” in ponderosa pine forests is desirable as it can meet many of the goals of multi-use land management. A forest stand with different-aged trees can support timber production, livestock grazing, recreation opportunities, wildlife habitat, and...

The Blue Mountains ecoregion of eastern Oregon, encompassing the Malheur, Umatilla, and Wallowa–Whitman National Forests, faces escalating wildfire risk driven by historical fire exclusion and fuel accumulation. This study integrates spatially explicit fuel reduction and restoration treatment planning with mass timber production to simultaneously enhance fire resilience and stimulate rural economic development. Using TreeMap 2022 data and potential operational delineations, we found that 69% of forests exceed fire-resilient desired future conditions, with 31% prioritized as potential...

Human actions, whether deliberate (e.g., fire suppression) or indeliberate (e.g., anthropogenic climate change), have and will continue to detrimentally impact wilderness ecosystems. These human-induced stressors are significantly degrading and even imperil the natural qualities of many wilderness areas (see Shive et al. 2026 ). Yet contemporary wilderness management philosophies, which arose in an era that predated rapid and ubiquitous environmental stressors such as climate change, may limit our ability to protect the natural conditions of these places.

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The rising frequency of large-scale, destructive wildfires has significantly affected not only natural ecosystems but also critical infrastructure, human lives, and properties. Given the devastating and often irreversible environmental and financial consequences, researchers from diverse fields are actively seeking solutions to improve resilience against wildfires. Fire suppression, one of the most effective strategies to mitigate wildfire damage, relies heavily on rapid and high-fidelity forecasting of fire spread. These predictions are essential for planning evacuations by state or local...

In the eastern United States, feeding by introduced predators Laricobius nigrinus Fender and Laricobius osakensis Shiyake and Montgomery are likely insufficient to sustainably regulate the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), Adelges tsugae Annand, due to adelgid population rebound postpredation. This suggests that additional predators may be needed in eastern North America to achieve effective biological control. In the Pacific Northwest, there is evidence that multiple specialist predators, including La. nigrinus, Leucotaraxis piniperda (Malloch), and Le. argenticollis (Zetterstedt)...

Forests around the world serve a wide variety of functions, from providing habitats for many species to delivering economic benefits for communities. Conserving forests is often seen as a cost to commercial forestry in that removing land from production could reduce wood supply and jobs. Research led by scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, however, shows that increased conservation may not necessarily come at a cost.A new study published in Nature Communications by researchers at the Forest Products Laboratory and the Southern Research Station, and their...

Traditional empirical fire danger rating systems are largely based on generalized historical weather-fire relationships. By contrast, fire behavior models incorporate interactions among weather, fuels and topography to simulate fire spread across landscapes, offering opportunities for wildfire danger evaluation.This study is to develop a novel Wildfire Danger Assessment and Forecast (WDAF) framework that estimates daily fire spread potential using spatially explicit fire simulations.The framework integrates weather, fuel and topographic data into a fire behavior model to simulate daily...