Treesearch

Wildfire risk has risen significantly due to climate change and the increase in housing development in the wildland urban interface (WUI), making household participation in fuel reduction crucial. However, homeowners’ perceived wildfire risk may diverge from professionals’ objective assessments. We use a choice experiment survey of Arizona homeowners in WUI areas to compare how willingness to pay (WTP) for public and private fuel reduction programs aligns with self-assessed versus professionally determined wildfire risk. Results show that while homeowners’ WTP for fuel reduction is...

Urbanisation has led to increasing homogenization of plant communities across cities. However, it is unclear whether these patterns extend to cosmopolitan plant species at the genetic level. We examined genome‐wide genetic patterns in six widespread plant species (three Poaceae and three Asteraceae) across five cities in the USA (Boston, Baltimore, Minneapolis‐St. Paul, Phoenix, and Los Angeles) using reduced‐representation sequencing. We assessed genetic structure, differentiation, and patterns of isolation by distance (IBD) and environment (IBE) to determine if species were genetically...

Turnover in species composition often lags behind the pace of climate change, resulting in mismatches between climate and communities. However, the impact of these community‐climate disequilibria on ecosystem functions is rarely considered, and current methods for measuring disequilibria assume that species ranges were, until recently, in equilibrium with climate. Here, we develop a simple theoretical model to address both of these problems by linking community‐climate disequilibrium with ecosystem functioning. We show how disequilibrium can impair functioning in the near‐term even when...

For the past 20 years, approximately twice as many trees were removed annually from urban areas in the USA as were harvested annually from the US National Forest System. Yet, most of this wood is treated as waste instead of as a valuable resource to generate economic growth and sustainable cities. Residential landowners are key actors in the establishment of local urban wood economies as both sources of material and users of urban wood products, yet they remain a difficult to reach group compared with others, such as tree care companies, mill operators, and public landowners.We analyze a...

This paper presents the results of the first systematic study aimed at defining the chronology, provenience and material components of 14 distinctive wood carvings featuring jaguar and raptorial bird imagery broadly attributed to northeastern South America, centred on Brazil’s Trombetas River region. These carvings, largely confined to drug-related paraphernalia and ceremonial objects (trumpets, rattles, staffs/sceptres and a hafted anchor axe), were part of antiquarian collections deposited in European museums mainly in the 19th century, with very little associated information. 14C AMS...

Successful landscape planning projects often incorporate input from local community members who live and work in the project area. Most people need to be able to see what a proposed change might look like; words are not enough. Images can provide a useful starting point for discussion among community members and planners, but community values and goals can be time-consuming to subsequently incorporate into draft visualizations and plans. Even when landscape architects can render visualizations for communities to use in planning, this process often requires meeting with stakeholders,...

The gas and tar composition of a wildland fire diffusion flame from longleaf pine needles is currently relatively unmeasured and more data are needed to fill in the gap between pyrolysis data and smoke plume data, thus improving physical and chemical modeling of wildland smoke formation. A pilot experiment to measure light gas and tar composition of such a flame is described for three flame zones: persistent flame (flame base), intermittent flame, and smoke plume. Flame gases from 24 experimental fires were collected in canisters and analyzed for CO2, CO, H2, CH4, and C2 to C7 hydrocarbon...

Urban forests and other green infrastructures have been viewed as part of the “Nature‐based Solutions” (NbS) to mitigate emerging urban environmental change. This study focuses on the role of evapotranspiration (ET) in regulating water balances of small watersheds in the eastern United States. We compared streamflow and ET patterns at daily, monthly and annual scales and linked these hydrological variables to the physical properties of 11 paired watersheds dominated by forests (FW) or urban (UW) land covers. The annual precipitation ranged from 1028 mm to 1683 mm and potential ET (PET)...

Land use change poses challenges to water supply sustainability. The San Jacinto watershed located in Southeastern Texas is a microcosm of these challenges, with high dependence on surface water supply and projected urban and agricultural expansion by 2070, with a corresponding decline in forest and natural grassland. This study used the Soil and Water Assessment tool (SWAT) to evaluate the effects of these land use changes on water quality and quantity in the San Jacinto watershed. Our results indicated that projected land use change could increase annual average river discharge by as...

To effectively manage fire, land and fire managers need detailed, current local information - for example, the amount of burnable material present, fuel moisture levels, winds, temperatures, and terrain changes across time and space. Managers also need these data to decide where, when, and how to treat a landscape while balancing costs and benefits, projected wildfire risk, and potential impacts.