Treesearch

Forested watersheds provide many ecosystem services, such as the filtration of sediment, pollutants, and nutrients, which are increasingly threatened by wildfire. For example, stream nutrient concentrations often increase following wildfire and can remain elevated for decades, making downstream waters susceptible to eutrophication. We investigated the drivers of persistent elevated stream nutrients, specifically nitrate (NO3-), in nine watersheds that were burned 16 years prior by the Hayman fire, Colorado, USA. We evaluated the ability of multiple linear regression and spatial stream...

Climate refugia, or places where habitats are expected to remain relatively buffered from regional climate extremes, provide an important focus for science and conservation planning. Within high-priority, multi-jurisdictional landscapes like the Madrean sky islands of the United States and México, efforts to identify and manage climate refugia are hindered by the lack of high-quality and consistent transboundary datasets. To fill these data gaps, we assembled a bi-national field dataset (n = 1416) for five pine species (Pinus spp.) and used generalized boosted regression to model pine...

Rapid climate change over the coming century will impact suitable habitat for many tree species. In response to these changes in climate, areas that become unsuitable will see higher mortality and lower growth and recruitment. Therefore, early detection of demographic trends is critical for effective forest management. Recent 10-year remeasurement data from the United States (US) Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program’s national annual inventory of forest land provides an ideal data set for analyzing such trends over large areas....

Prescribed fire is increasingly being considered as a viable management tool by public and private land managers. Fully expanding prescribed fire use in a land management context, where it is an ecologically effective but not commonly applied tool, requires a comprehensive understanding of barriers that limit prescribed fire, especially in working rangelands of the North American Great Plains. While there is an emerging body of work on the perceptions of prescribed fire, there has yet to be a compilation of the research. We present a systematic review of the published literature on the...

This is the second paper of a two-part series on the barriers to prescribed fire use in the Great Plains of the USA. While the first part presented a systematic review of published papers on the barriers to prescribed fire use, specifically regarding perceptions and attitudes of land managers, this second part reviews the solutions that are employed to increase prescribed fire use by land managers in the Great Plains. First, the review compiled the solutions currently and ubiquitously employed to promote fire use and how they have been documented to address barriers. Second, potentially...

Climate change will continue to alter spatial and temporal variation in fire characteristics, or pyrodiversity. The causes of pyrodiversity and its consequences for biological communities are emerging as a promising research area with great potential for understanding and predicting global change. We reviewed the literature related to the causes and consequences of pyrodiversity over the 3-year period 2019-2021 to identify emerging themes and innovations.

The ability of soil insecticidal drenches or spray-on insecticide/fungicide treatments to protect mass timber elements was assessed using two modified AWPA ground proximity tests established in 2017 and 2019. The 2017 test evaluated 3-ply Douglas-fir cross-laminated timber using a modified AWPA Standard E26 while the 2019 test used a modified AWPA E21 protocol to evaluate 3-ply Douglas-fir or southern pine cross-laminated timber as well as Douglas-fir mass plywood panels. Both tests were installed at the Harrison Experimental Forest (Saucier, Mississippi) and will be assessed for five...

Understanding how environmental adaptations mediate plant and ecosystem responses becomes increasingly important under accelerating global environmental change. Multi-stemmed trees, for example, differ in form and function from single-stemmed trees and may possess physiological advantages that allow for persistence during stressful climatic events such as extended drought. Following the worst drought in Hawaii in a century, we examined patterns of stem abundance and turnover in a Hawaiian lowland dry forest (LDF) and a montane wet forest (MWF) to investigate how multi-stemmed trees might...

We explored the diameter growth of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) planted in 1961, during the years following disturbances from Hurricane Katrina (2005) and thinning (2011) at the Harrison Experimental Forest in southern Mississippi. Winds from Hurricane Katrina destroyed 7 percent of the longleaf pine and damaged much more, while the thinning was variable based on existing density, with 29 percent of trees being removed. In April 2017, a total of 180 trees were sampled with an increment borer and analyzed to quantify basal area increment (BAI). After Hurricane Katrina impacted the site...

As we reckon with the effect of COVID-19 on the research enterprise in hydrologic science, it is important to acknowledge that disruptions will be persistent and that institutional-level adjustments, while helpful, are not sufficient to mitigate all impacts on hydrologic scientists. Here, we describe the breadth of research contributions in the hydrologic sciences, consider how the pandemic has impacted this portfolio of contributions, document one impact that is already being realized in publication of research, and suggest guidance to the hydrologic science community, institutions,...