Treesearch

The USDA Forest Service is required to develop “land management plans,” which serve as roadmaps for maintaining the health and productivity of national forests and grasslands. These plans are designed to support ecological integrity, or an ecosystem’s ability to withstand environmental disturbance. One way that national forests and grasslands, or “planning units”, measure ecological integrity is by looking at the way that focal species respond to the effects of management activities and environmental changes.

For over fifty years, the Landsat satellite series has provided continuous and comprehensive data for monitoring changes on the Earth’s terrestrial surface. Eight successive missions, carrying progressively more sophisticated sensors, with improved radiometric, geometric, and spatial characteristics, have provided an unbroken series of optical and thermal imagery, unparalleled globally. With limited lifetimes for each Landsat satellite, planning of each mission typically overlaps to ensure continuity. Commencing in 2021, planning of a Landsat-9 successor gathered user needs from across the...

Until recently, wildlife habitat maps were static documents that can quickly become outdated anytime landscape conditions changed due to disturbances like wildfire, drought, and timber harvest. But now, researchers at the Rocky Mountain Research Station and their collaborators have developed an approach for producing near-real-time wildlife habitat maps using Google Earth Engine. These products are called Living Maps because of their ability to stay up to date - incorporating new input data and remaining accurate over time - thus functioning like an automated wildlife habitat monitoring...

Mature and old-growth forests (MOG) provide essential ecosystem services, yet they face increasing threats. Currently, high-intensity, high-severity wildfires are the main driver for loss of MOG on federally managed forests across the United States. Quantifying MOG forests with greatest exposure to stand-replacing wildfires provides essential information for land managers. We integrated geospatial data from fire behavior simulations (fire intensity), fire refugia prediction (fire severity), forest type mapping, and carbon estimates to assess exposure of MOG forests to stand-replacing...

Drought is expected to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change, highlighting the urgency of understanding drought impacts on wildlife across geographies and taxonomic groups. We conducted a review of peer‐reviewed articles from 1982 to 2024, focusing on the impacts of anomalous drought on terrestrial vertebrates. We recorded 3324 total wildlife responses, 188 from single‐species studies and 3136 from multi‐species studies. Within single‐species studies, 66% of responses were negative, 32% were unclear, and 2% were positive, illustrating the widespread threat of increasing...

Soils on log landings can be significantly degraded as a result of harvesting equipment. We evaluated the efficacy of biochar application and subsoiling to reduce compaction and improve soil properties. Fifteen log landings were selected across three US Midwest national forests: the Hoosier National Forest in Indiana, the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri, and the Shawnee National Forest in Illinois. Landings were divided into four treatments: (1) biochar applied on the soil surface (22.4 Mg ha −1 ), (2) subsoiling (depth of 50 cm), (3) a combination of subsoiling and biochar (22.4 Mg...

Biochar, a carbon-rich material that can be produced from forest byproducts and waste, is emerging as a valuable material for removing heavy metal ions from aqueous solutions. Biochar can be produced by many processes and equipment. Among these, mobile air curtain burners, developed to achieve lower levels of particulate matter and smoke than open pile burning, can be deployed in the field where biomass feedstocks are located. To elucidate lead metal ion (Pb2+) removal mechanisms, this study characterized seven biochars generated by a novel mobile curtain burner, representing the first...

The breadth of management goals in large and complex landscapes encompasses biotic communities with diverse life histories. However, managing multiple communities may be challenging when resource requirements overlap, like forage for ungulates and floral resources for bees. For three years in a riparian forest in northeastern Oregon, USA, we manipulated the presence of wild deer and elk, domestic cattle, and the combination of wild and domestic ungulates, to understand the separate and cumulative influence of grazing by different functional feeding guilds on bloom and bee communities....

The effects of salvage logging on runoff and sediment delivery processes are not well understood. We used rill erosion simulation experiments for 3 years after the 2013 Rim Fire to understand how post‐fire salvage logging and mitigation practises affect runoff and sediment delivery rates. We assessed soil conditions, surface cover, runoff rates and sediment delivery rates on hillslope plots that were either burned at high severity (controls) or burned at high severity with additional logging treatments including no logging traffic, few pass or many pass skid trails, and skid trails that...

White-nose syndrome (WNS), caused by the fungal pathogen Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd), has led to widespread declines in tricolored bat (Perimyotis subflavus) populations across the eastern United States. Management actions have largely focused on increasing overwinter survival rates of Pd-infected bats through directly manipulating hibernacula. Maintenance of high-quality active-season habitat is also an important component of bat population recovery because it can result in higher body fat composition during the overwintering period and therefore increase survival rates of individual...