Treesearch

Flowing lava and water have dramatically different physical properties but can form similar hydraulic structures, including undular hydraulic jumps, or standing wave trains. In water flows, undular hydraulic jumps are evidence of critical flow (Froude number ∼1) and open-channel hydraulic theory provides a powerful tool for estimating flow depth and velocity. Monitoring these parameters in an active lava channel is inherently challenging, but essential for calculating lava discharge (effusion rate), a primary control on the rate of flow front advance and ultimate flow runout distance. We...

Process-based Forest Landscape Models (FLMs) rely on first principles to simulate ecological patterns and processes, making them uniquely powerful for forecasting ecological dynamics under unprecedented climatic and disturbance regimes. Persistent challenges with any ecological forecasting model are calibration (“tuning” the model) and validation (“proofing” the model). As no actual future data exist from which to conduct a formal model validation, model credibility is established through numerous tests against empirical datasets and comparisons with other types of models. The purpose of...

Prescribed burning may induce erosion and change many physico-chemical properties of forest soils and these may vary with different burn severity conditions. Few studies have compared the effects of prescribed fires on rainsplash erosion and soil properties. Therefore, there is the need to better understand the variability of forest soils burned by prescribed fires with low and high severity under natural conditions. Rainsplash erosion, soil surface covers and physico-chemical properties of surface soil have been evaluated in the short term (15 months) in micro-plots of a burned pine...

Private actions to mitigate and adapt to climate change may have benefits to both the individual and society. In some cases, an individual may be motivated by appeals that highlight benefits to others, rather than to oneself. We test whether such prosocial framing influences information-seeking behavior to address wildfire risk among homeowners. In a field experiment across ten communities in western Colorado, property owners (n = 2977) received a postcard from their local fire department highlighting the impact of risk mitigation to either "your property" (private benefits) or "our...

Rapidly scaling up the use of prescribed fire is being promoted as an important pathway for reducing the growing damages of wildfire events in the United States, including limiting the health impacts from smoke emissions. However, we do not currently have the science needed to understand how the health impacts associated with prescribed fire smoke in the present compare to wildfire smoke exposure in the future. In particular, we lack an understanding of how the potential long-term public health benefits of prescribed fire on future wildfire smoke and health impacts compare to prescribed...

The development of near-real time forest monitoring systems, which are used to create alerts for events such as logging or fire, often involves tradeoffs between accuracy and timeliness. In the context of forest monitoring, timeliness is measured by the lag between when a change occurs in the forest and the creation of an alert about the event. Conventional accuracy assessments quantify both false negative and false positive errors in change maps, but do not specify those rates as a function of lag. Recent near real-time (NRT) accuracy assessment methods summarize the relationship between...

Accurate estimation of aboveground forest biomass stocks is required to assess the impacts of land use changes such as deforestation and subsequent regrowth on concentrations of atmospheric CO2. The Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) is a lidar mission launched by NASA to the International Space Station in 2018. GEDI was specifically designed to retrieve vegetation structure within a novel, theoretical sampling design that explicitly quantifies biomass and its uncertainty across a variety of spatial scales. In this paper we provide the estimates of pan-tropical and temperate...

Underlying policy efforts to address global climate change is the scientific need to develop the methods to accurately measure and model carbon stocks and fluxes across the wide range of spatial and temporal scales in the Earth system. Initiated in 2010, the NASA Carbon Monitoring System is one of the most ambitious relevant science initiatives to date, exploiting the satellite remote sensing resources, computational capabilities, scientific knowledge, airborne science capabilities, and end-to-end system expertise that are major strengths of the NASA Earth Science program. Here we provide...

NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission offers data for temperate and pan-tropical estimates of aboveground forest biomass (AGB). The spaceborne, full-waveform LiDAR from GEDI provides sample footprints of canopy structure, expected to cover about 4% of the land area following two years of operation. Several options are available for estimating AGB at different geographical scales. Using GEDI sample data alone, gridded biomass predictions are based on hybrid inference which correctly propagates errors due to the modeling and accounts for sampling variability, but this...

Phellinus noxius is a fungus that causes brown root rot disease in tree and shrub species of subtropical and tropical regions. It has infected and rapidly killed hundreds of important tree and shrub species in these regions. It is widespread in the Pacific Region including all the island states of American Samoa, the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap), the Republic of Palau, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (Islands of Rota and Saipan), and Guam. This report explains how to detect brown root rot disease and its causal pathogen (P. noxius) by...