Treesearch

Community wildfire readiness includes homeowner wildfire risk mitigation and wildfire evacuation preparedness. This report presents results from a household survey distributed to homeowners in the study area around Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2024 which was a follow-up to a previous survey of homeowners of the same residences, consisting of mostly identical questions, that was conducted in 2021. This follow-up survey was motivated by the nearby 2022 Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. Comparison of results indicates general stability in the aggregated responses to most survey questions. As found...

Lecanosticta acicola is a fungal pathogen that causes brown spot needle blight (BSNB). It primarily impacts the genus Pinus and has been introduced to much of the Northern Hemisphere. Brown spot needle blight causes a reduction of leaf area and photosynthetic capacity that can lead to reduced growth and mortality in extreme cases. In the southeastern USA, the disease has historically primarily impacted grass stage longleaf pine (Pinus palustris). Around 2015, large areas of plantation loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) were found to be infected with L. acicola, which is outside of historic norms...

On October 9, 2023, the main mast of the historic schooner Grace Bailey unexpectedly snapped at about two-thirds of its height and fell onto the deck, killing one passenger and injuring three others. The United States Coast Guard promptly initiated a formal investigation into the cause of the mast’s sudden failure. At the request of the Coast Guard, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) conducted an on-site evaluation of the broken mast on December 19, 2023. The inspection used nondestructive testing methods and included visual analysis,...

Passive acoustic monitoring is increasingly used for broad-scale, noninvasive tracking of biodiversity across space and time, but processing the resulting audio data at scale remains a major challenge. To address this, we have iteratively developed PNW-Cnet, a convolutional neural network trained to detect wildlife vocalizations in unprocessed field recordings collected throughout a large, forested region of the western United States. Initially built to identify six owl species, PNW-Cnet has evolved through successive retrainings and dataset expansion. We trained PNW-Cnet v5 on 824,120...

When wildland firefighters head into the field, they know the work is dangerous; but until now, agencies lacked detailed data on exactly which activities and hazards posed the greatest threats. A recent analysis of five years of serious firefighter injuries offers new insights.

While buildings have been constructed of wood for centuries, mass timber has revolutionized wood as a building material by enabling construction of high-rise wood buildings, thereby rivaling concrete and steel. Using cross-laminated timber—a form of mass timber made by stacking and adhering dried lumber in alternating directions into solid panels—can increase construction speeds while sequestering carbon, reducing emissions, and providing a market for sustainable forest products.As the number and complexity of structures made with cross-laminated timber continue to increase, critical fire...

The principal findings from the five panels of the 10th forest survey of Florida are presented. In 2018, forests covered more than 16.9 million acres of the State, of which 14.9 million were classified as timberland. Longleaf-slash pine was the most common forest-type group and covered 5.1 million acres of timberland. The second most common forest-type group was oak-gum-cypress, which covered 3.1 million acres of timberland. Nonindustrial private forest ownerships controlled 69 percent of the State’s timberland. Softwood tree species accounted for 57 percent of the 22.8 billion cubic feet...

The USDA Forest Service is required to develop “land management plans,” which serve as roadmaps for maintaining the health and productivity of national forests and grasslands. These plans are designed to support ecological integrity, or an ecosystem’s ability to withstand environmental disturbance. One way that national forests and grasslands, or “planning units”, measure ecological integrity is by looking at the way that focal species respond to the effects of management activities and environmental changes.

Our analysis of 61 versions of the Great Basin (GB) Indigenous oral-history narrative, Theft of Pine Nuts , provides valuable new paleoecological insights into late Pleistocene (LP) and Holocene biogeography of pinyon pine ( Pinus monophylla ). Pinyon homelands indicated by Indigenous sources were located not only within the current pinyon distribution but also north of the known range, in northern California and Nevada, southern Oregon and Idaho, and western Wyoming. These extramarginal pinyon locations corroborate and expand a Western science hypothesis that proposed LP or Early Holocene...

As attention to valley‐bottom or Stage‐0 restoration increases, direct attempts to evaluate its effects on highly valued salmonid fishes remain rare. We evaluated a valley‐bottom restoration project at Whychus Creek, Oregon, by simulating its effects on the abundance of both resident trout (native Rainbow Trout Oncorhynchus mykiss and introduced Brown Trout Salmo trutta ) that currently occupy the site and anadromous Chinook Salmon O. tshawytscha that historically occupied the site. Specifically, we compared results from a spatially explicit, individual‐based model for pre‐restoration...