Treesearch

Wildfire is a natural phenomenon with substantial economic consequences, and its management is complex, dynamic, and rife with incentive problems. This article reviews the contribution of economics to our understanding of wildfire and highlights remaining knowledge gaps. We first summarize economic impacts to illustrate scale and trends. We then focus on wildfire management in three phases: mitigation before fires occur, response during fires, and response after fires. The literature highlights economic interdependencies and spillover effects across fire-prone landscapes as the source of...

The potential for trophic cascades triggered by recent range expansion of the Barred Owl (Strix varia) to the Pacific Northwest has caused concern among conservationists and managers. Barred Owl predation of small forest carnivores is a particular concern because these carnivores typically have low population growth rates relative to their body size owing to long interbirth intervals, which may result in sensitivity to increased mortality. The Western Spotted Skunk (Spilogale gracilis) is a common small carnivore in forests of the Pacific Northwest that may be a prey item for Barred Owls,...

1. Deep soil water utilization allows plants to cope with drought stress. However, little is known about the roles of the understorey layers in driving spatio-temporal variations of deep soil water in forests and how the patterns of deep soil water use among life-forms contribute to community assembly processes.2. We assessed the spatio-temporal patterns and determinants of deep water utilization of tree, shrub and herb layers in subtropical coniferous plantations and investigated associations between deep water use parameters and dominance and richness of understorey vegetation.3. We...

Understanding and predicting the relationship between leaf temperature (Tleaf) and air temperature (Tair) is essential for projecting responses to a warming climate, as studies suggest that many forests are near thermal thresholds for carbon uptake. Based on leaf measurements, the limited leaf homeothermy hypothesis argues that daytime Tleaf is maintained near photosynthetic temperature optima and below damaging temperature thresholds. Specifically, leaves should cool below Tair at higher temperatures (i.e., > ∼25–30°C) leading to slopes <1 in Tleaf /Tair relationships and substantial...

The Swift Terrestrial Passive Acoustic Recording Unit from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, running firmware v. STM32 0.18.6.3, produced an initial 4-sec sound anomaly in each sound (wave file) recording, created by the power-saving features of the unit as it switches from standby to record mode. The sound anomaly had a statistically significant impact on several soundscape indices calculated from the recordings. Here, as a case study of identifying and solving this problem, I dissected the nature of the anomaly and analyzed the variable effects it has on calculated ecoacoustic soundscape...

Natural history is the study of organisms in their environments, and has an historic role as the foundation for ecological and biological sciences (e.g., Jerdon 1874). The centrality of natural history was emphasized by Elton (1927) who defined ecology as “scientific natural history.” As an accounting of the “history” of nature, natural history studies entail personal involvement; indeed, even the etymology of “history” suggests seeing, knowing, and accounting of one's inquiries and knowledge ( www.etymonline.com). In this paper, we trace the use and the scientific and social values of...

Smoke from wildfires has become a growing public health issue around the world but especially in western North America and California. At the same time, managers and scientists recommend thinning and intentional use of wildland fires to restore forest health and reduce smoke from poorly controlled wildfires. Because of the changing climate and management paradigms, the evaluation of smoke impacts needs to shift evaluations from the scale of individual fire events to long-term fire regimes and regional impacts under different management strategies. To confront this challenge, we integrated...

The amenity migration phenomenon and outdoor recreation growth has led to rapid amenity-based development of many gateway communities in the American West, particularly in regions adjacent to protected public lands. This amenity-based development typically enhances traditional regional economic indicators of income, employment, and taxes but can result in run-away housing costs, a hollowing out of income distribution, residential sprawl, and conflict among long-term residents and new arrivals. However, little research has focused specifically on how such migration and the existence of...

We investigated the relative importance of daily fire weather, landscape position, climate, recent forest and fuels management, and fire history to explaining patterns of remotely-sensed burn severity - as measured by the Relativized Burn Ratio - in 150 fires occurring from 2001 to 2019, which burned conifer forests of northeastern Washington State, USA. Daily fire weather, annual precipitation anomalies, and species' fire resistance traits were important predictors of wildfire burn severity. In areas burned within the past two to three decades, prior fire decreased the severity of...