Treesearch

The contribution of non timber forest products (NTFPs) has been acknowledged globally for their role in conservation, income generation, livelihood improvement and rural development. The potential of a NTFP-based bioeconomy has given a new dimension to the forest sector, and NTFPs are now considered favourably by the resource rich developing economies. The actual contribution of NTFPs has never been adequately estimated due to lack of sufficient baseline information on extraction, consumption patterns and traded quantities in Kashmir, India. Complicated management frameworks and fragmented...

This report presents the strategic direction for research at the Rocky Mountain Research Station to address climate change challenges in the context of resilience, disturbance, and recovery. It describes how current and future RMRS research programs could be enhanced and applied to address emerging challenges.

The reestablishment of natural fire regimes can have numerous benefits for forest ecosystems, including the restoration of stand structure through a reduction in tree densities and increased representation of large diameter trees. However, fire effects may depend on how departed the ecosystem is from its historical fire frequency. Red fir (Abies magnifica) forests occupy a broad geographic area across which historical fire return intervals and stand structures vary. Using historical stand inventory data from the Vegetation Type Mapping (VTM) project, we evaluated red fir forests in the...

Recent drought and bark beetle outbreaks in California have resulted in substantial impacts to forest ecosystems throughout the state, with thousands of acres in need of restoration or reforestation. This user-friendly, Web-based decision support tool is designed to assess priority areas for reforestation activities where tree mortality is high within the national forests of the Sierra Nevada bioregion. The tool consists of three components: (1) spatial prioritization tool, (2) stand data summary tool, and (3) reforestation best management practices guide. The spatial prioritization tool...

Although cellulose nanomaterials have promising properties and performance in a wide application space, one hinderance to their wide scale industrial application has been associated with their economics of dewatering and drying and the ability to redisperse them back into suspension without introducing agglomerates or lose of yield. The present work investigates the dewatering of aqueous suspensions of cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) using ultrasound as a potentially low-cost, non-thermal, and scalable alternative to traditional heat-based drying methods such as spray drying. Specifically, we...

This open access book synthesizes current information on wildland fire smoke in the United States, providing a scientific foundation for addressing the production of smoke from wildland fires. This will be increasingly critical as smoke exposure and degraded air quality are expected to increase in extent and severity in a warmer climate. Accurate smoke information is a foundation for helping individuals and communities to effectively mitigate potential smoke impacts from wildfires and prescribed fires. The book documents our current understanding of smoke science for (1) primary physical,...

Recent large wildfires in the USA have exposed millions of people to smoke, with major implications for health and other social and economic values. Prescribed burning for ecosystem health purposes and hazardous fuel reduction also adds smoke to the atmosphere, in some cases affecting adjacent communities. However, we currently lack an appropriate assessment framework that looks past the planned versus unplanned nature of a fire and assesses the environmental conditions under which particular fires burn, their socio-ecological settings, and implications for smoke production and management....

Modeling smoke dispersion from wildland fires is a complex problem. Heat and emissions are released from a fire front as well as from post-frontal combustion, and both are continuously evolving in space and time, providing an emission source that is unlike the industrial sources for which most dispersion models were originally designed. Convective motions driven by the fire’s heat release strongly couple the fire to the atmosphere, influencing the development and dynamics of the smoke plume. This chapter examines how fire events are described in the smoke modeling process and explores new...

Smoke plume dynamic science focuses on understanding the various smoke processes that control the movement and mixing of smoke. A current challenge facing this research is providing timely and accurate smoke information for the increasing area burned by wildfires in the western USA. This chapter synthesizes smoke plume research from the past decade to evaluate the current state of science and identify future research needs. Major advances have been achieved in measurements and modeling of smoke plume rise, dispersion, transport, and superfog; interactions with fire, atmosphere, and canopy;...