Treesearch

Yellow pine and mixed-conifer (YPMC) forests are common forest types in northwestern California and southwestern Oregon (the “assessment area”). YPMC forests occur above oak woodland and mixed-evergreen forests and below red fir forests, and are dominated by diverse combinations of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Lawson & C. Lawson), Jeffrey pine (P. jeffreyi Balf.), incense cedar (Calocedrus decurrens (Torr.) Florin), Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco), white fir (Abies concolor (Gord. & Glend.) Lindl. ex Hildebr.), and sugar pine (P. lambertiana Douglas) with a notable...

Dangerous wildfire conditions continue to threaten people and ecosystems across the globe and cooperation is critical to meeting the outsized need for increased prescribed burning in wildfire risk reduction work. Despite the benefits of using prescribed fire to mitigate wildfire risks, prescribed fire implementation is still challenging. Collaboration and capacity-building can help address policy and capacity barriers inhibiting prescribed fire. We conducted 53 interviews across four case studies in the western United States where federal land management agencies and cooperative actors are...

A census of endangered plant populations is critical to determining their size, spatial distribution, and geographical extent. Traditional, on-the-ground methods for collecting census data are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. Use of drone imagery coupled with application of rapidly advancing deep learning technology could greatly reduce the effort and cost of collecting and analyzing population-level data across relatively large areas. We used a customization of the YOLOv5 object detection model to identify and count individual dwarf bear poppy (Arctomecon humilis) plants in...

Process-based classification of rivers is widely used for assessing the effects of past landscape disturbance, current biophysical conditions, and likely responses to future disturbance, including land management and restoration activities. This article reviews the purposes of geomorphic channel classification, the different types of classifications that have been developed, their use, compatibility, and popularity (i.e., why some classifications are used more than others), and concludes with a look at future needs and directions for channel classification.

White-nose syndrome (WNS) has caused dramatic declines of several cave-hibernating bat species in North America since 2006, which has increased the activity of non-susceptible species in some geographic areas or during times of night formerly occupied by susceptible species-indicative of disease-mediated competitive release (DMCR). Yet, this pattern has not been evaluated across multiple bat assem-blages simultaneously or across multiple years since WNS onset. We evaluated whether WNS altered spa-tial and temporal niche partitioning in bat assemblages at four locations in the eastern...

Background: Bats are important components of forested ecosystems and are found in forests worldwide. Consequently, they often interact with fire. Previous reviews of the effects of fire on bats have focused on prescribed fire effects, in part due to the limited number of studies on bat responses to wildfire. However, over the past several years, studies on bat responses to wildfire and prescribed fire have increased considerably. We reviewed this rapidly expanding body of literature to determine whether bats respond differently to prescribed fire and wildfire, and the important factors...

In the Klamath River Basin (KRB) of northern California and southern Oregon, climate-related changes, such as more intense droughts, varied and concentrated precipitation, earlier spring and later fall conditions, extreme temperatures, and decreased snowpack have contributed to increasingly unpredictable plant reproduction and harvest cycles. In this study, we explore contemporary relationships between plants and Indigenous People in the KRB, identifying benefits of cultural ecosystem services (CES) derived from Indigenous stewarding and gathering of culturally significant plants, and...

Implementation of wildfire- and climate-adaptation strategies in seasonally dry forests of western North America is impeded by numerous constraints and uncertainties. After more than a century of resource and land use change, some question the need for proactive management, particularly given novel social, ecological, and climatic conditions. To address this question, we first provide a framework for assessing changes in landscape conditions and fire regimes. Using this framework, we then evaluate evidence of change in contemporary conditions relative to those maintained by active fire...

The objective of this study was to test pre-treatment hydrologic calibration relationships between paired headwater watersheds(WS77(treatment) and WS80 (control) and explain the dir=fference in flow, compared to earlier published data, using daily rainfall,runoff, and a water table measured during 2011-2019 in the Santee Experimental Forest in coastal South Carolina, USA.Mean monthly runoff difference between WS80 and WS77 of-6.80mm for 2011-2019, excluding October 2015 with an extreme flow event,did not differsignificantly from -8.57 mm (p=0.27) for the 1969-1978 period from -3.89 mm for...

In this study, we calibrated and tested the Soil Conservation Service Curve Number 21 (SCS-CN) based Modified Sahu-Mishra-Eldo (MSME) model for predicting storm event total direct 22 runoff (Qtot) The MSME model satisfactorily predicted the estimated Qtot_pred for three watersheds, 23 unsatisfactory for one watershed. These results demonstrate MSME model’s potential to predict 24 direct runoff in poorly drained forested watersheds as reference for urbanizing coastal landscapes. 25 The flooding conditions of the lower coastal plain landscapes can be further exacerbated beyond 26 that shown...