Treesearch

An indigenous subterranean termite, Reticulitermes tibialis Banks, fed on quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) and loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) stakes in prescribed burn and non-burned field plots on an established sagebrush-steppe rangeland restoration study site on Red Mountain, southeastern Idaho, expanding the known distribution of the ‘arid-land subterranean termite’ species. Aspen and pine stakes in the plots as part of a 5-year wood-decay study were unexpectedly damaged by termites. Groups of 25, 15-cm-long stakes were placed horizontally on the soil surface, and groups of...

Wildfires are an essential part of a healthy ecosystem, yet the expansion of the wildlandurban interface, combined with climatic changes and other anthropogenic activities, have led to the rise of wildfire hazards in the past few decades. Managing future wildfires and their multi-dimensional impacts requires moving from traditional reactive response to deploying proactive policies, strategies, and interventional programs to reduce wildfire risk to wildland-urban interface communities. Existing risk assessment frameworks lack a unified analytical method that properly captures uncertainties...

Forest management has the potential to contribute to the removal of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere via carbon sequestration and storage. To identify management actions that will maximize carbon removal and storage over the long term, models are needed that accurately and realistically represent forest responses to changing climate. The most widely used growth and yield model in the United States (U.S.), the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS), which also forms the basis for several forest carbon calculators, does not currently include the direct effect of climate variation on tree...

Addressing the challenges of wildland fire requires that fire science be relevant to management and integrated into management decisions. Co-production is often touted as a process that can increase the utility of science for management, by involving scientists and managers in knowledge creation and problem solving. Despite the documented benefits of co-production, these efforts face a number of institutional barriers. Further research is needed on how to institutionalise support and incentivise co-production. To better understand how research organisations enable and constrain co-productio...

Verifying the abundance and distribution of species of conservation concern is necessary for land management agencies to determine potential impacts of management actions and for monitoring long‐term population trends. In the Rocky Mountains of the United States, Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) and wolverine (Gulo gulo) are currently species of management importance for federal land management agencies. Optimal winter methods for detecting the 2 species differ in that wolverines are generally detected using bait stations and lynx are most efficiently detected through snow‐track encounters....

Wildfires are a perennial event globally, and the biogeochemical underpinnings of soil responses at relevant spatial and temporal scales are unclear. Soil biogeochemical processes regulate plant growth and nutrient losses that affect water quality, yet the response of soil after variable intensity fire is difficult to explain and predict. To address this issue, we examined two wildfires in Colorado, United States, across the first and second postfire years and leveraged statistical learning (SL) to predict and explain biogeochemical responses. We found that SL predicts biogeochemical...

Soil respiration (RS) is one of the largest fluxes in the global carbon cycle. It is composed of respiration by roots and heterotrophic organisms, with each component having distinctive drivers and sensitivities and, consequently, varying feedback potential to climate change. Global drivers of the total flux of RS are widely studied and generally accepted, but our understanding of the factors governing its component fluxes lags far behind.

Following decades of fire exclusion, managers are increasingly implementing prescribed fire in southern Appalachian forests. To date, the use of prescribed fire in the region has often been focused on reducing hazardous fuel loads and has typically occurred in the dormant season. Understanding the effects of burning in different periods of plant growth may reveal how burn season influences patterns of vegetative succession. In this study, we compared the effects of prescribed burn treatments conducted in the dormant season (January-early April) vs. the early growing season (mid-late April)...

Effective watershed management and protection of water resources from non-point source pollution require identification, prioritization, and targeting of pollutant source areas. Process-based hydrology and water quality models are powerful heuristic tools for land and water resources managers. However, because of their complexity, such models are often under-utilized as management prioritization and planning tools. In this paper, we present a prioritization, interactive visualization, and analysis tool (Pi-VAT) that is programmed to synthesize multi-scenario, multi-watershed outputs from...

Monitoring forest structural properties is critical for a range of applications because structure is key to understanding and quantifying forest biophysical functioning, including stand dynamics, evapotranspiration, habitat, and recovery from disturbances. Monitoring of forest structural properties at desirable frequencies and cost globally is enabled by space-borne LiDAR missions such as the global ecosystem dynamics investigation (GEDI) mission. This study assessed the accuracy of GEDI estimates for canopy height, total plant area index (PAI), and vertical profile of plant area volume...