Treesearch

Wildlife management areas (WMAs) are important part of the public land system for forest-based recreation in the United States. Despite the growing literature on the economics of outdoor recreation, information about the economic benefit of visitors’ access to WMAs, common to 35 states nationally, is lacking. WMAs differ from other public areas because of their unique focus on promoting conservation as well as consumptive and nonconsumptive uses. With the data collected from a mixed-mode survey of WMA permit holders, this study estimated a travel cost model of WMA visitation with price...

Purpose of Review I aim to contextualize wildfire-disease interactions with the goal of building a better understanding of where these may be of ecological importance and problems for sustainable forest management. Recent Findings While wildfire-disease interactions have been documented, they are not well represented in the ecological literature, probably because they require considerable effort or serendipity to rigorously quantify. Examples of disease-fire interactions are relatively limited and tend to be clearer in systems where fire and disease are management problems. The most...

Disease combined with drought poses an important threat to plant survival, often compromising success in the restoration of riparian forests. Thus, understanding how biotic and abiotic stressors may affect plant survival and growth performance can greatly increase the success of ecosystem management strategies. The purpose of this study was to understand how two plant species, often used together in restoration of riparian ecosystems but with different ecological preferences, would respond to infection by each of two Phytophthoraspecies in Mediterranean-climate regions, in the absence or...

Northern Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) are of management and conservation concern in the US Pacific Northwest where populations have been monitored since the 1990s using mark-resight methods. Passive acoustic monitoring has the potential to support monitoring efforts; however, its use is currently primarily restricted to determining species presence rather than breeding status. Distinguishing female from male Northern Spotted Owl vocalizations could facilitate determination of pair status using passive acoustic methods, greatly enhancing inference derived from noninvasive...

We screened and validated microsatellite DNA markers (i.e., simple sequence repeats, SSRs) from transcriptome sequences of white oak (Quercus alba L.). Of 84 PCR primer pairs previously identified and designed, we found 23 pairs that amplified white oak genomic DNA consistently and were polymorphic among three DNA samples. Subsequently, 16 of these 23 primer pairs were amplified across 225 white oak trees sampled from naturally regenerated stands on the Daniel Boone National Forest in southeastern Kentucky. Population estimates of heterozygosity and total and effective allele numbers...

Community forests have been established in many parts of the United States, spanning a broad range of ownership models, tenure regimes, governance approaches, aims, and activities, and have evolved over time within local and larger-scale social-ecological contexts and conditions. Understanding how different community forest ownership models and associated property rights and governance regimes shape benefits and potential trade-offs for forests and communities in the United States is important for devising effective policies and practices related to community forestry. In this chapter, we...

Effective conservation and management of a species relies upon understanding its habitat throughout its full annual cycle. For hoary bats, Lasiurus cinereus, their ecology is largely known from summer with the exception that they move long distances during autumn and spring and maintain some level of activity year-round. Autumn is a critically important period for hoary bats as they complete long-distance migrations between summer and winter range and they mate, both of which are energetically expensive. We studied hoary bat roost selection during autumn in a migratory stopover area in...

This publication documents a visit by the renowned English biometrician, Dr. Ronald A. Fisher, to the Appalachian Forest Experiment Station headquarters in August 1936, to present a series of seminars on study design to principal forest researchers from all Forest Service experiment stations and several universities. The seminars were arranged by the Washington Office of the Forest Service as training for scientists to increase the quality of agency research by using study designs and data analysis methods recently developed by Fisher and others. The photograph shows the group of seminar...

Carbon (C) allocation and nonstructural carbon (NSC) dynamics play essential roles in plant growth and survival under stress and disturbance. However, quantitative understanding of these processes remains limited. Here we propose a framework where we connect commonly measured carbon cycle components (eddy covariance fluxes of canopy CO2 exchange, soil CO2 efflux, and allometry-based biomass and net primary production) by a simple mass balance model to derive ecosystem-level NSC dynamics (NSCi), C translocation (dCi), and the biomass production efficiency (BPEi) in above- and belowground...