Treesearch

For 20 years, the Climate Change Tree Atlas has given foresters insight into tree species trends and how possible future climate scenarios may affect eastern tree species' habitat suitability. The Climate Change Tree Atlas recently underwent a major overhaul. Now even more resources are available to land managers looking for detailed data sets and maps on species traits, habitat quality, land cover, and dispersal potential for most tree species in the eastern United States. Tables and maps on the website are intended to inform land managers and landowners about their forests and enable...

Shared stewardship for the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS), or the creation of partnerships, is integral to the completion of basic and fundamental stewardship tasks within wilderness (e.g., trail work, Leave No Trace education, monitoring). However, successful wilderness shared stewardship is impeded by a variety of barriers, which are institutional (e.g., employee turnover), practical (e.g., lack of staff, limited informational resources about how to set up partnerships), and conceptual (e.g., ambiguity surrounding what wilderness shared stewardship is). There has been...

Visitor use in wilderness has grown over the past several decades, along with research focused on visitor use management (VUM) in congressionally designated wilderness. This scoping review of research published between 2000 and 2020 explores the distribution and representativeness of wilderness VUM research within the context of (a) the federal land management agencies administering wilderness and (b) the geographic distribution of research. Findings indicate wilderness administered by the Bureau of Land Management and US Fish and Wildlife Service were disproportionately understudied...

Models of relationships among forest inventory sampling efficiency and cluster plot configuration variables inform decisions by inventory planners. However, relationships vary under different spatial heterogeneity scenarios. To improve understanding of how spatial patterns of forests affect these relationships, we implemented a factorial experiment by simulating forest pattern at both the landscape and stand scales. We sampled these simulated forests with a variety of cluster plot configurations, calculated coefficient of variation (CV) of trees per hectare for each replicate, and tested...

Small area estimation is a powerful modeling technique in which ancillary data can be utilized to "borrow" additional information, effectively increasing sample sizes in small spatial, temporal, or categorical domains. Though more commonly applied to biophysical variables within the study of forest inventory analyses, small area estimation can also be implemented in the context of understanding social values, behaviors, and trends among types of forest landowners within small domains. Here, we demonstrate a method for deriving a continuous fine-scale land cover and ownership layer for the...

Hurricanes cause billions of dollars in damage annually in the United States and are projected to increase in intensity in the coming years. By exploring historical patterns of hurricanes and exposure of these hurricane-force winds across the landscape, areas of potentially high threat to future hurricane winds can be revealed. Combining potential threats from hurricane winds with forest data reveal the areas with the greatest potential threats to this important resource. Not surprisingly, most of the threats to forests occur in the Southeast, but the greatest threats to urban forests...

Federally designated wilderness areas in the US are mandated to fulfill social and ecological goals. Long-term monitoring is key to this mandate, yet is seldom consistent across boundaries. Our purpose is to compile literature and data to examine the utility of a strategic forest inventory for meeting wilderness management objectives and for enabling coordinated interagency responses to boundary-crossing challenges (e.g., pollution, wildfires, plant invasions, global changes). We provide examples from a national forest inventory (NFI), which provides nationally consistent information that...

To repair ecological damage caused by construction, landscape managers typically apply restoration techniques - but what if these activities further damage the ecology? Invasive Phytophthora pathogens have been inadvertently introduced to environmentally vulnerable and important restoration sites, often resulting in plant illness or death and the need for costly remediation. The USDA Forest Service and partners have been researching invasive pathogens in the genus Phytophthora to protect sensitive habitats in restoration sites in high risk regions around the country.

Birds are part of the ecological foundation on which all life depends. For decades, USDA Forest Service scientists have studied birds to understand and quantify the far-reaching ways that they affect ecosystem services (life-sustaining and other benefits humans derive from nature) and function as environmental warning systems. This work is expected to become more important in light of increasingly extreme weather events, urban expansion, deforestation, climate change, invasive species, and diminishing biodiversity. This research has recently been integrated with a Forest Service tree and...

Fine-scale topography and canopy cover can play an important role in mediating effects of regional-scale climate change on the below-canopy environment in mountain forests. The aim of this study was to determine how below-canopy temperatures in a high-elevation Rocky Mountain forest have been affected by canopy change resulting from severe wildfire and spruce beetle outbreak within the last 10-15 years.