Treesearch

The USDA Forest Service uses many forms of technology to manage 193 million acres that comprise the National Forest System: handheld data-entry devices and satellites; modeling software and LiDAR (light detection and ranging) remote sensing; and desktop computers and servers. Collectively, these technologies power the models that create the maps land managers use to monitor and understand landscape changes. Adopting cloud-computing platforms, such as Google Earth Engine (GEE), offers potential to advance these monitoring efforts even further.Researchers with the USDA Forest Service’s...

Resumen Tras los incendios forestales en Estados Unidos, el Departamento de Agricultura y el Departamento del Interior movilizan equipos de respuesta de emergencia en zonas quemadas (BAER) para evaluar las condiciones inmediatas de las cuencas hidrográficas tras el incendio. Los equipos BAER deben determinar las amenazas de inundación, erosión del suelo e inestabilidad. La elaboración de un mapa de severidad del incendio en el suelo tras el incendio es un primer paso importante en el proceso de evaluación rápida. Permite a los equipos de BAER priorizar las revisiones de campo y localizar...

Rapid response is critical following natural disasters like wildfire. Fire, runoff, and erosion risks are highly heterogeneous in space, creating an urgent need for rapid, spatially-explicit assessment. In the past, data preparation has been time consuming and expensive, resulting in extensive losses in values-at-risk (VARs). The Rapid Response Erosion Database (RRED, http://rred.mtri.org/rred/) allows researchers and land managers to access properly-formatted spatial model inputs for the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) anywhere within the continental US and eventually beyond....

Negative imagery of destruction may induce or inhibit action to reduce risks from climate-exacerbated hazards, such as wildfires. This has generated conflicting assumptions among experts who communicate with homeowners: half of surveyed wildfire practitioners perceive a lack of expert agreement about the effect of negative imagery (a burning house) on homeowner behavior, yet most believe negative imagery is more engaging. We tested whether this expectation matched homeowner response in the United States. In an online experiment, homeowners who viewed negative imagery reported more negative...

Should wilderness be understood as primarily untrammeled or primarily natural? In this paper, we examine the conceptual and philosophical roots of untrammeled and natural in the context of the 1964 Wilderness Act and show how in some situations tension can arise between them, leading to a stewardship dilemma and subsequent debate over the future conservation role of wilderness. After showing that this debate is ultimately rooted in a false dichotomy, we offer a conceptual framework that presents managers with the tools necessary to shepherd the wilderness idea through the changing environme...

Mature forests provide important wildlife habitat and support critical ecosystem functions globally. Within the dry conifer forests of the western United States, past management and fire exclusion have contributed to forest conditions susceptible to increasingly severe wildfire and drought. We evaluated declines in conifer forest cover in the southern Sierra Nevada of California during a decade of record disturbance by using spatially comprehensive forest structure estimates, wildfire perimeter data, and the eDaRT forest disturbance tracking algorithm. Primarily due to the combination of...

Serotinous cones, those that remain closed until heated, confer post-disturbance resilience on many lodgepole pine forests throughout the Southern Rockies. The record-breaking extent of wildfires in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming in 2020 raised concerns about tree regeneration in areas where crown fires burned lodgepole pine stands that had experienced high levels of mortality during bark beetle outbreaks occurring more than a decade previously. We measured seed germination and assessed the relationship between cone age and seed viability for serotinous cones on beetle-killed...

Due to increasing global trade of timber commodities and illegal logging activities, wood species listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) appendices are facing extinction, and their international trade has been banned or is under supervision. Reliable and applicable species-level discrimination methods have become urgent to protect global forest resources and promote the legal trade of timbers. This study aims to discriminate CITES-listed species from their look-alikes in international trade using quantitative wood anatomy (QWA)...

This is the executive summary for the report Climate Change Vulnerability and Adaptation in Southwest Oregon, by Halofsky et al. (2022, PNW-GTR-995). The vulnerability and adaptation assessment was conducted by the Southwest Oregon Adaptation Partnership, a science-management partnership. The partnership assessed the vulnerability of natural resources to climate change and developed adaptation options that minimize its negative impacts and facilitate ecosystem transition to a warmer climate.

Syntactic foams and their reinforcement with cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) in a thermosetting polyester resin (PR) matrix were studied in order to provide a pathway for lightweight composites for automotive applications with enhanced performance including thermomechanical properties and water uptake. A novel method for coating hollow glass spheres (HGS) with CNC was developed. Various combinations of functionalized CNC and surface modified HGS were studied to determine interactions between the two materials. Surface analysis techniques indicated that CNC were successfully deposited onto the...