Treesearch

Climate change and land use change jointly are the largest drivers of population declines, range contraction and extinction for many species across the globe. Wideranging and large-bodied species are especially vulnerable to habitat loss and fragmentation due to their typically low population densities, reflecting their need for extensive and connected habitats. We used the multi-scale Random Forests machine learning algorithm to identify factors driving the habitat selection and future changes in habitat of Himalayan brown bear, an iconic wide-ranging and large-bodied species of high...

An increased emphasis on fuel management strategies to mitigate wildfire risks is raising the awareness and need for comprehensive forest management strategies that satisfy long-term water quantity and water quality needs. Forest management activities can alter the soil nutrient pools and affect the timing and magnitude of stream water quantity and quality. We investigated the effect of contemporary forest management activities, including clear-cutting and thinning, on water yield and stream nitrogen and phosphorus dynamics in a quarter-centurylong (1992-2016) paired and nested watershed...

Fusarium spp. comprise diverse plant pathogens, which affect both agriculturally and ecologically important plant species, and harmless saprobes. Fusarium spp. inhabit widely ranging, geographic regions across the globe and can be found in soil or plant tissue in every climate type, ranging from tropical to polar regions. In their native habitats, Fusarium spp. are typically innocuous and ubiquitous soil saprophytes; however, Fusarium spp. can become devastating pathogens, especially after introduction into novel environments, where hosts are not adapted to Fusarium infection. Hawai'i is...

In 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture adopted a new planning rule that outlined a process for developing, amending, and revising land management plans for the 155 National Forests, 20 National Grasslands, and one Tallgrass Prairie managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The rule outlines a framework with three phases: assessment, development/amendment/revision, and monitoring. We are assisting National Forests in the western U.S. with the first phase by completing a series of assessments of riparian and groundwater-dependent ecosystems. Here, we describe our methods and the lessons...

Most of the population and economic growth in the United States occurs in megaregions as the clustered metropolitan areas, whereas climate change may amplify negative impacts on water and natural resources. This study assesses shifts in regional hydroclimatology of fourteen US megaregions in response to climate change over the 21st century. Hydroclimatic projections were simulated using the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model driven by three downscaled climate models from the Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analogs (MACA) dataset to cover driest to wettest future conditions in the...

Tree-killing bark beetles are globally the most destructive forest pests and their impacts have increased in recent decades. Such an increase has been consistently reported from Europe and North America, and it is, with high confidence, driven by climate change. We investigated how the scientific community in both continents responded to this situation by conducting a comprehensive search of the Scopus database from 1970 to 2020. Studies that investigated interactions between climate change and two prominent bark beetles in Europe and North America, the European spruce bark beetle Ips...

Until fairly recently, the majority of landscape connectivity analyses have considered connectivity as a static landscape feature, despite the widespread recognition that landscapes and the abiotic and biotic processes that influence them are dynamic. With the advent of new analytical techniques and the increasing availability of time-series data to characterize landscape dynamics, more connectivity analyses are addressing dynamics in landscapes that can arise from changes in environmental conditions, the planning environment, and social-ecological systems. Inspired by a symposium at the...

Rangeland production is a foundational ecosystem service and resource on which livestock, wildlife, and people depend. Capitalizing on recent advancements in the use of remote sensing data across rangelands, we provide estimates of herbaceous rangeland production from 1986 to 2019 at 16-d and annual time steps and 30-m resolution across the western United States. A factorial comparison of this dataset and three national scale datasets is presented, and we highlight a multiple-lines-of-evidence approach when using production estimates in decision making. Herbaceous aboveground biomass at...

Orasema minutissima Howard (Hymenoptera: Eucharitidae) is recorded from the Hawaiian Islands for the first time. It has been established on the island of Hawai‘i since at least 2019. The wasp is a parasitoid of the immature stages of Pheidole and Wasmannia (Formicidae: Myrmicinae), both of which are significant pests on several of the Hawaiian Islands. Already found in substantial numbers, the wasp is a potential biological control agent for Wasmannia auropunctata, the Little Fire Ant.

The oyamel forests, as Abies dominated forests are commonly known as, register their largest distribution (95% of their population) along the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt (TMVB). Although efforts have been made to study these forests with various approaches, dendrochronology-based studies have been limited, particularly in pure Abies forests in this region. The objective of this study was to reconstruct fire regimes in an Abies religiosa forest in the Sierra Norte in the state of Puebla, Mexico. Within an area of 50-ha, we collected 40 fire-scar samples, which were processed and analyzed...