Treesearch

Urbanization increasingly causes alterations in prey diversity and abundance, land cover, and human disturbance, subsequently impacting populations of even the most adaptable species. American Kestrels are currently considered urban adapters, which may be veiling the influence of urbanization on their continental population decline. We quantified overwintering abundance and sex ratios of American Kestrels throughout the past three decades in a rapidly developing region of the species’ wintering range in southeast Florida to study spatial and temporal population trends relative to degree of...

Few previous studies have described the patterns of leaf characteristics in response to nutrient availability and depth in the crown. Sugar maple has been studied for both sensitivity to light, as a shade-tolerant species, and sensitivity to soil nutrient availability, as a species in decline due to acid rain. To explore leaf characteristics from the top to bottom of the canopy, we collected leaves along a vertical gradient within mature sugar maple crowns in a full-factorial nitrogen (N) by phosphorus (P) addition experiment in three forest stands in central New Hampshire, USA. Thirty-two...

Urban-forestry research can seem far removed from the on-the-ground realities of planting and maintaining urban trees. How can obtuse articles published in obscure journals help get more trees in the ground? Some scientists think that the opposite is also true: urban-forestry practitioners have little to contribute to new research. We believe that both views are short sighted and fail to see opportunities for mutually-beneficial collaboration between urban-forestry practice and research. The purpose of this article is to showcase an example of a successful collaboration between researchers...

The Great Basin floristic region spans three Level III ecoregions (Central Basin and Range, Northern Basin and Range, and Snake River Plain) and makes up a large portion of the Intermountain West of the United States. Over 75% of the Great Basin is publicly owned and managed by the US federal land management agencies, with state agencies also managing large areas. The primary human uses of public lands are grazing and recreation, with mining and oil and gas development found in some locations. The Great Basin has a range of mostly arid and semi-arid ecosystems from salt desert through...

The risk of destructive wildfire on fire-prone landscapes with excessive fuel buildup has prompted the use of fuel reduction treatments to protect valued resources from wildfire damage. The question of how to maximize the effectiveness of fuel reduction treatments at landscape scales is important because treating an entire landscape may be undesirable or unfeasible. We reviewed 86 simulation studies that examined landscape-scale fuel reduction treatment effectiveness for landscapes of the USA or Canada. Each of these studies tested effects of fuel reduction treatments on wildfire through...

By all measures, wildfires in the western United States are becoming more extreme. Fires are growing larger and burning more intensely, and suppression costs are spiraling upward. Maximizing the effectiveness of fuel treatments at the landscape scale is key given limited resources and the inability to treat all areas likely to burn in a wildfire.

Stream fluxes are commonly reported without a complete accounting for uncertainty in the estimates, which makes it difficult to evaluate the significance of findings or to identify where to direct efforts to improve monitoring programs. At the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA, stream flow has been monitored continuously and solute concentrations have been sampled approximately weekly in small, gaged headwater streams since 1963, yet comprehensive uncertainty analyses have not been reported. We propagated uncertainty in the stage height–discharge...

This paper describes a dataset mined from the public archive (1999-2020) of the US National Incident Management System Incident Status Summary (ICS-209) forms (a total of 187,160 reports for 35,170 incidents, including 34,478 wildland fires). This system captures detailed daily/regular information on incident development and response, including social and economic impacts. Most (98.4%) reports are wildland fire-related, with other incident types including hurricane, hazardous materials, flood, tornado, search and rescue, civil unrest, and winter storms. The archive, although publicly...

Noxious weeds plague farmers and ranchers, push out native species, and cause both economic and ecological damage. Synthetic herbicides, developed in the 1940s, are often used to control the spread of these plants. By the late 1950s, scientists noticed that some herbicides were no longer effective on certain plant species, even after a typically lethal dose. Since then, scientists have worked to understand the plant traits and management actions that lead to herbicide resistance. This work is especially important as land managers attempt to eradicate plants legally deemed "noxious" and...