Treesearch

Almost half of all Americans (45 percent) reported that their lives were affected a lot by COVID-19 pandemic conditions in 2020 and experienced a lot of worry and stress on a daily basis (Gallup, Inc. 2021). Nevertheless, even more said that they thrived. The study of human populations is rife with such paradoxes, especially during moments of change, when habits are shaken but values are clarified. Even in relatively uniform social groups, the same event can spur a wide variety of responses.

Animals that create structures often display non-random patterns in the direction of their constructions. This tendency of oriented construction is widely presumed to be an adaptive trait of the constructor’s extended phenotype, but there is little empirical support for this hypothesis. Particularly, for cavity nesting-birds there is a lack of studies examining this issue. In this study of a primary cavity excavator, the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker (Dryobates borealis), we show that cavity entrances exhibited a strong westward bias in all 11 of the populations examined throughout...

Wildland fire management is a complex system with various scales, modes, plans, and operations. As with any system, fire management can be subject to stresses and strains that are, in some cases, easy to identify in isolation but highly challenging to diagnose at a system level. A suitable analogy is the homeostatic range in the human body - that is, the limits on levels such as body temperature, pH, and blood level. Modern medicine has a quantitative understanding of the normal, extreme, and fatal ranges of these indicators.

The COVID-19 global pandemic created dramatic change in nearly every facet of life, including how the Forest Service worked to fulfill its mission despite facing multiple unknowns fraught with risks. Preparing for and responding to wildland fire while reducing the likelihood that wildland fire responders would be exposed to COVID-19 created an unprecedented challenge.

The extent to which persisting species may fill the functional role of extirpated or declining species has profound implications for the structure of biological communities and ecosystem functioning. In North America, arthropodivorous bats are threatened on a continent-wide scale by the spread of white-nose syndrome (WNS), a disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans. We tested whether bat species that display lower mortality from this disease can partially fill the functional role of other bat species experiencing population declines. Specifically, we performed high-throughp...

In 2022 the US Forest Service launched an ambitious 10-year strategy to address the escalating wildfire danger in the U.S. “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests” includes a 10-year plan to substantially increase the scale of forest health and risk reduction fuel treatments over the next decade. The plan expands and prioritizes treatments on 20 million acres on National Forest System lands, and 30 million acres of other federal, state, tribal, and private lands, targeting lands where wildfire ignitions will...

Land management legacies coupled with climate change have led to shifts in western ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forest structure and fire regimes. A growing body of evidence suggests that under increasing area burned at high-severity, warming and drought, ponderosa pine forests are vulnerable to conversion to alternate forest types or non-forest vegetation. However, the extent and direction of recent fire-induced changes in southwestern US ponderosa pine forests have not been subject to region-wide evaluation. Here, we assess recent fire effects in ponderosa pine forests using long-term...

Since 1972, the Landsat program has been continually monitoring the Earth, to now provide 50 years of digital, multispectral, medium spatial resolution observations. Over this time, Landsat data were crucial for many scientific and technical advances. Prior to the Landsat program, detailed, synoptic depictions of the Earth's surface were rare, and the ability to acquire and work with large datasets was limited. The early years of the Landsat program delivered a series of technological breakthroughs, pioneering new methods, and demonstrating the ability and capacity of digital satellite...

The emerging bioeconomy requires new supply chain paradigms for biomass materials to reach processing centers. Forest bio-hubs can be thought of as networks of collection points to facilitate biomass supply chains that feed from forest to central processing facilities. The design and functionality of forest bio-hubs depends on the form (e.g., vertically and horizontally integrated), and the quality and volume of feedstocks. In this paper we conceptually develop the potential role of forest bio-hubs. We then compare current bio-hub development in three U.S. regions—the Pacific Northwest,...

Whole body vibration (WBV) is a risk factor for the development of musculoskeletal disorders among logging equipment operators. In 2014 we sampled operator exposure to WBV in logging equipment common in the southern United States. The average weighted acceleration anticipated over an eight-hour day (A(8)) was 0.64 ms-2 (sd 0.32) for trailer mounted loaders, 1.04 ms-2 (sd 0.42) for wheeled feller-bunchers, and 1.58 ms-2 (sd 0.34) for skidders. All were above the European Union (EU) action value of 0.51 ms-2, but skidders were consistently above the limit value of 1.15 ms-2. Because travel...