Treesearch

Forest carbon is a large and uncertain component of the global carbon cycle. An important source of complexity is the spatial heterogeneity of vegetation vertical structure and extent, which results from variations in climate, soils, and disturbances and influences both contemporary carbon stocks and fluxes. Recent advances in remote sensing and ecosystem modeling have the potential to significantly improve the characterization of vegetation structure and its resulting influence on carbon. Here, we used novel remote sensing observations of tree canopy height collected by two NASA spaceborne...

In the Southwest United States, many ponderosa pine forests no longer resemble the pre-European settlement forests that were adapted to frequent, low-severity wildfires. The cumulative effects of fire suppression, livestock grazing, high-grading, and insect outbreaks have created conditions that frequently result in high-severity wildfires.

The manipulation of water resources is a common human solution to water-related problems. Ofparticular interest because of impacts on both source and destination is the anthropogenic movementof water from one basin to another, or inter-basin transfers (IBTs). In the United States, IBTs occurwidely in both wet and dry regions, but IBT data are not collated and served in a coordinated way.Thus researchers wishing to account for transfers between basins have faced difficulty in doing so.Here we present the outcome of a systematic investigation into inter-basin surface water transfersconnected...

Revenue from forest-based environmental services tracks the actual payments to private forest landowners1 for the environmental services they provide. These payments represent financial incentives for landowners to maintain or increase forest cover, or change management techniques in ways that enhance environmental services. Tracking the actual payments to landowners is essential for designing effective policies for environmental service production, improving forest policy and management decision-making, and for assessing the overall contribution of forests to economies and well-being.

Historical logging practices and fire exclusion have reduced the proportion of pine in mixed-conifer forests of the western United States. To better understand pine’s decline, we investigate the impact of historical logging on the tree regeneration layer and subsequent stand development over almost a century of fire exclusion. We use a unique dataset derived from contemporary (∼2016) remeasurement of 440 historical quadrats (∼4m2) in the central Sierra Nevada, California, in which overstory trees, tree regeneration, and microsite conditions were measured and mapped both before and after...

In November, on a month-over-month basis, housing permits declined; this suggests further moderation in single-family activity in the upcoming months. The number of housing completions was the “bright” spot for housing construction. Other year-over-year and month-over-month data were mostly negative.

Aim: Biodiversity changes can occur gradually or as distinct jumps as species distributions end and others begin. However, comprehensive assessments of freshwater biodiversity and how assemblages change along a continuum have been hindered by the connectivity and networked nature of streams and their large numbers of rare and cryptic species found there. We hypothesize that the boundary where fish distributions end marks an ecological shift in freshwater assemblages and could unify stream concepts.Location: Trask River watershed, Oregon, USA, temperate North America.Taxon: Fishes, amphibian...

The use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to assess aquatic biodiversity is a growing field with great potential for monitoring and managing threatened species, likefreshwater mussel (Unionidae) populations. Freshwater mussels are globally imperiled and serve essential roles in aquatic systems as a food source and as anatural water filter making their management essential for ecosystem health. Unfortunately, mussel populations are often understudied, and challenges exist toaccurately and efficiently describe the full suite of species present. Multispecies eDNA approaches may also be more...