Treesearch

The Purdue Agribusiness Science Academy (PASA) is a program designed to increase youth interest and engagement in agriculture and also increase youth association of agriculture with STEM. The twelve-year history of the program demonstrates support for its existence and success at Purdue University. However, future empirical research needs to be done to determine if PASA can be seen as a model for other universities and organizations to follow.

Strategic foresight is a tool for understanding the ways in which the future might unfold. It is a valuable tool for identifying and mitigating areas of risk while identifying opportunities for our forests, particularly in an age of uncertainty and accelerating change. In recent years, foresight has increasingly been adopted by governments, large organizations, and forward-looking business enterprises as a method to reduce risk for their operations. But forestry agencies have been relatively slow to adopt strategic foresight methods and perspectives. A key principle of foresight is the...

(1) Background: Federal land managers in the US are charged with risk-based decision-making which requires them to know the risk and to direct resources accordingly. Without understanding the specific factors that produce risk, it is difficult to identify strategies to reduce it. (2) Methods: Risk characterized by U.S. land managers during wildfires was evaluated from 2010-2017 to identify factors driving risk perceptions. Annotation from 282 wildfires in two regions with distinctive risk profiles, the Northwest and Southwest Geographic Areas, were qualitatively coded using the risk...

Cairpol and Aeroqual air quality sensors measuring CO, CO2, NO2, and other species were tested on fresh biomass burning plumes in field and laboratory environments. We evaluated the sensors by comparing 1 min sensor measurements to collocated reference instrument measurements. The sensors were evaluated based on the coefficient of determination (r2) between the sensor and reference measurements, as well as by the accuracy, collocated precision, root mean square error (RMSE), and other metrics. In general, CO and CO2 sensors performed well (in terms of accuracy and r2 values) compared to...

Green infrastructure (GI) refers to trees, rain gardens, rain barrels, and other features that address stormwater management, climate change and other challenges facing many cities. GI is often not equitably distributed across urban landscapes, making its benefits unevenly experienced. Cities have multiple initiatives focused on different types of GI in residential areas, including underserved neighborhoods, although there is potential for GI programs to serve more privileged neighborhoods. The goal of this study was to examine GI program participants and non-participants to better...

Urban trees in lawns and along streets are anthropogenically constructed systems, in that these tree communities are formed by human planting and removal actions. Tree mortality studies are essential to understanding the temporal dynamism of urban forests, and in particular, it is critical to incorporate institutional records and human decision-making regarding tree removals. In this study, we investigated tree removals on a highly urbanized college campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (US) by analyzing field inventories and institutional records, and by considering firsthand accounts of...

Wildland firefighters must be able to maintain situational awareness to ensure their safety. Crew members, including lookouts and crew building handlines, rely on visibility to assess risk and communicate changing conditions. Geographic information systems and remote sensing offer potential solutions for characterizing visibility using models incorporating terrain and vegetation height. Visibility can be assessed using viewshed algorithms, and while previous research has demonstrated the utility of these algorithms across multiple fields, their use in wildland firefighter safety has yet to...

Soil temperature measurements from a Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) monitoring site in the Ozark Highlands Major Land Resource Area (MLRA 116A) were evaluated on landscapes comprising Typic Fragiudults (Scholten series) and Typic Paleudults (Poynor series). The fve soil forming factors were similar for both soils, with the major difference between the adjacent soils being a fragipan in the Scholten series. Air and soil temperatures were collected from a weather station of the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service near the border of the mesic soil temperature regime and udic...

Fire is a natural ecosystem process that helps maintain and revitalize healthy landscapes, but wildfires can pose significant threats to public and firefighter safety, property, water and air quality, and other values. Finding an appropriate balance of managing for the beneficial and detrimental impacts of fire can be a challenge, and in many forest and grassland ecosystems, a legacy of fire exclusion and changes in land use patterns has led to unnatural accumulations of flammable vegetation and increasing wildfire hazard. Wildfire management entails a breadth of actions taken before,...

Development of landscape connectivity and spatial population models is challenging, given the uncertainty of parameters and the sensitivity of models to factors and their interactions over time. Using spatially and temporally explicit simulations, we evaluate the sensitivity of population distribution, abundance and connectivity of tigers in Southeast Asia to variations of resistance surface, dispersal ability, population density and mortality. Utilizing a temporally dynamic cumulative resistant kernel approach, we tested (1) effects and interactions of parameters on predicted population...