Treesearch

Effects of cool-season (November-April) and warm-season (May-October) prescribed burning treatments and a spring wildfire on the soils and hydrologic functioning of the oak savannas on the Cascabel Watersheds in the Southwestern Borderlands Region of Arizona and New Mexico are reported in this paper. The impacts of the fire events on transpiration, formation of water repellent soils, hillslope soil erosion and deposition, streamflow regimes, and sediment depositions are among these soil and hydrologic functions. Results should be useful in planning management activities in similar oak...

Mycelium-bonded bio-composites are promising new materials for replacing non-sustainable products. In such composite systems, fungal mycelia work as an adhesive, bonding together lignocellulosic substrate particles. In this work, we focus on the two groups of mycelium-bonded bio-composites: as-grown foams and hot-pressed (densified) panels. We used Trametes versicolor mycelium and yellow birch wood particles as a substrate and incubated the mixture for up to 30 days. We investigated the relationship between mycelium growth and essential end-use properties. We revealed that in as-grown...

Over the past century, foresters in the Southern United States have achieved remarkable success in the practice of silviculture. Key elements of success include learning how to plant southern pines, which gave rise to genetic improvement and cultural practices that have placed short-rotation planted pine stands on a quarter of the South’s timberlands. A second element was the application of conservative silvicultural practices, including uneven-aged methods in southern pines, to help recover cutover but partially stocked stands. Both these advances contributed to retaining industrial...

Spatial wildfire ignition predictions are needed to ensure efficient and effective wildfire response, and robust methods for modeling new wildfire occurrences are ever-emerging. Here, ignition locations of natural and human-caused wildfires across the state of Montana (USA) from 1992 to 2017 were intersected with static, 30 m resolution spatial data that captured topography, fuel availability, and human transport infrastructure. Once combined, the data were used to train several simple and multiple logistic generalized linear models (GLMs) and generalized additive models (GAMs) to predict...

Predicting where the next large-scale wildfire event will occur can help fire management agencies better prepare for taking preventive actions and improving suppression efficiency. Wildfire simulations can be useful in estimating the spread and behavior of potential future fires by several available algorithms. The uncertainty of ignition location and weather data influencing fire propagation requires a stochastic approach integrated with fire simulations. In addition, scarcity of required spatial data in different fire-prone European regions limits the creation of fire simulation outputs....

Citizen science allows volunteers to actively participate in the scientific inquiry process and as a discipline has increased in recent years. Many citizen science efforts work across broad spatio-temporal scales, making it possible to address questions that typically cannot be assessed through single studies due to budgetary, time, and scale constraints. Citizen science provides an opportunity to collect data that would otherwise not be collected, contributes to knowledge of ecological and management topics, and involves citizens in ecological science and management issues. Citizens often...

Many animals adjust the timing of seasonal events, such as reproduction, molt, migration, and hibernation, in response to interannual variation and directional climate-driven changes in temperature. However, the mechanisms by which temperature influences seasonal timing are relatively under-explored. Seasonal timing involves retrograde signaling in which thyrotropin (TSH) in the pars tuberalis (PT) alters expression of thyroid hormone (TH) deiodinases (Dio2/Dio3) in tanycyte cells lining the third ventricle of the hypothalamus. This, in turn, affects the availability of triiodothyronine...

Hibernation involves prolonged intervals of profound metabolic suppression periodically interrupted by brief arousals to euthermy, the function of which is unknown. Annual cycles in mammals are timed by a photoperiodically-regulated thyroid-hormone-dependent mechanism in hypothalamic tanycytes, driven by thyrotropin (TSH) in the pars tuberalis (PT), which regulates local TH-converting deiodinases and triggers remodeling of neuroendocrine pathways. We demonstrate that over the course of hibernation in continuous darkness, arctic ground squirrels (Urocitellus parryii) up-regulate the...

Shifts in the timing of cyclic seasonal life-history events are among the most commonly reported responses to climate change, with differences in response rates among interacting species leading to phenological mismatches.Within a species, however, males and females can also exhibit differential sensitivity to environmental cues and may, therefore, differ in their responsiveness to climate change, potentially leading to phenological mismatches between the sexes. This occurs because males differ from females in when and how energy is allocated to reproduction, resulting in marked sex-differe...