Treesearch

Rangelands provide numerous ecosystem services, including forage for livestock grazing. Effective grazing management requires measuring forage availability, which influences the level of grazing that can be sustained while maintaining healthy ecological conditions. However, spatiotemporal variability makes such determinations of forage quantity difficult, potentially hindering optimal management. These determinations are especially difficult across large, remote areas. To address this, we developed an approach using data from a one-time sampling of vegetation throughout the Uintah and...

Anellovirus infections are highly prevalent in mammals, however, prior to this study only a handful of anellovirus genomes had been identified in members of the Felidae family. Here we characterise anelloviruses in pumas (Puma concolor), bobcats (Lynx rufus), Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis), caracals (Caracal caracal) and domestic cats (Felis catus). The complete anellovirus genomes (n = 220) recovered from 149 individuals were diverse. ORF1 protein sequence similarity network analysis coupled with phylogenetic analysis, revealed two distinct clusters that are populated by felid-derived...

Wildland fire activity and associated emission of particulate matter air pollution is increasing in the United States over the last two decades due primarily to a combination of increased temperature, drought, and historically high forest fuel loading. The regulatory monitoring networks in the Unites States are mostly concentrated in larger population centers where anthropogenic air pollution sources are concentrated. Smaller population centers in areas more likely to be impacted by wildland fire smoke in many instances lack adequate observational air quality data. Several commercially...

Wildland fires can emit substantial amounts of air pollution that may pose a risk to those in proximity (e.g., first responders, nearby residents) as well as downwind populations. Quickly deploying air pollution measurement capabilities in response to incidents has been limited to date by the cost, complexity of implementation, and measurement accuracy. Emerging technologies including miniaturized direct-reading sensors, compact microprocessors, and wireless data communications provide new opportunities to detect air pollution in real time. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)...

Risk management is a significant part of federal wildland fire management in the USA because policy encourages the use of fire to maintain and restore ecosystems while protecting life and property. In this study, patterns of wildfire risk were explored from operational relative risk assessments (RRA) completed by land managers on 5087wildfires from 2010 to 2017 in every geographic area of the USA. The RRA is the formal risk assessment used by land managers to develop strategies on emerging wildfires when concerns and issues related to wildfire management are in real-time. Only 38% of these...

Tropical montane forests are being lost at an alarming rate but harbor some of the globe’s most unique biodiversity. The Hawaiian archipelago is a prime example of the importance of high elevation forests to species conservation and persistence as they serve as the last refugia for Hawaiian birds. Yet these forests have been converted to invasive dominated pastures, and efforts to restore them have been met with limited success. Unsuccessful forest restoration may be due to freezing temperatures acting as a demographic bottleneck by killing seedlings recruiting into pastures. We determined...

Post-wildfire changes to hydrologic and geomorphic systems can lead to widespread sediment redistribution. Understanding how sediment moves through a watershed is crucial for assessing hazards, developing debris flow inundation models, engineering sediment retention solutions, and quantifying the role that disturbances play in landscape evolution. In this study, we used terrestrial and airborne lidar to measure sediment redistribution in the 2016 Fish Fire, in the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California, USA. The lidar areas are in two adjacent watersheds, at spatial scales of 900 m2...

The development of comprehensive fire management and risk assessment strategies is of prominent concern in Southern Europe, due to the expanding scale of wildfire risk. In this work, we applied simulation modeling to analyze fine-scale (100-m resolution) wildfire exposure and risk transmission in the 24,000 km2 island of Sardinia (Italy). Sardinia contains a variety of ecological, cultural, anthropic and touristic resources that each summer are threatened by wildfires, and represents well the Mediterranean Basin environments and conditions. Wildfire simulations based on the minimum travel...

Across the globe, aircraft that apply water and suppressants during active wildfires play key roles in wildfire suppression, and these suppression resources can be highly effective. In the United States, US Department of Agriculture Forest Service (USFS) aircraft account for a substantial portion of firefighting expense and higher fatality rates compared to ground resources. Existing risk management practices that are fundamental to aviation safety (e.g., routinely asking, “Is this flight necessary?”) may not be appropriately scaled from a risk management perspective to ensure that the...

The traditional surface energy balance (SEB) is investigated by applying the thermal energy balance based on total energy conservation. Based on total energy conservation, the thermal and the kinetic energy balances are connected through non-hydrostatic energy transfer (QNH) as a result of the hydrostatic imbalance caused by potential energy changes from vertical density fluxes in response to mechanical and thermal forcing in the stratified atmosphere. Field observations show that both QNH and the surface energy imbalance (SEI) have the same diurnal variation; both are near zero under...