Treesearch

At the 1971 meeting North American Society for Bat Research (NASBR) in Albuquerque, Don Wilson and James S. Findley presented “Randomness in Bat Homing.” The central tenet of their paper was that homing ability in bats could be explained by chance alone or by some sort of random search [Wilson and Findley (Am Nat 106:418–424, 1972)]. In this retrospective, we assess the knowledge gained from, but also the limitations of, older studies on bat homing and review the advances in our understanding of homing and navigation in bats. Although we have learned much over the last half-century about...

Despite the increasing challenges wildfires are posing around the globe, and the flourishing production of highquality wildfire scientific knowledge, the ability of fire science to impact knowledge on the ground, for people, society, economy, and the environment, in a way that facilitates change in the current wildfire management system has been limited. We believe that one reason for this limited impact is due to the fragmentation of this scientific knowledge. Therefore, we propose a Translational Wildfire Science (TWFS) as a new field of knowledge that captures the comprehensive dynamics...

Cave-hibernating bats are widespread in North America but are facing precipitous population declines due to the impacts of white-nose syndrome (WNS). It is in winter hibernacula that bats are most vulnerable to the fungus that causes WNS, but the locations of over-wintering sites in western North America are largely unknown. This poses a significant challenge for bat monitoring, disease surveillance, and management efforts at the disease front. To advance initiatives to locate bats on the landscape, we developed real-time PCR assays to detect big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) from environme...

Populus trichocarpa Torr. and Gray (black cottonwood) is an economically and ecologically important tree species native to western North America. It serves as a model tree species in biology and genetics due to its relatively small genome size, rapid growth, and early reproductive maturity (Jansson and Douglas 2007). Black cottonwood is susceptible to root rot caused by at least one species of Armillaria (Raabe 1962), a globally distributed genus that exhibits diverse ecological behaviors (Klopfenstein et al. 2017) and infects numerous woody plant species (Raabe 1962). However, several...

The fungus Elytroderma deformans causes a serious needle disease of pines in western North America and is considered the most important needle disease of ponderosa pine in Montana. While important, there has been limited evaluation of pre-commercial thinning or other treatments on disease incidence. Our study assessed the efficacy of various silvicultural treatments to reduce impacts from Elytroderma disease within monitoring plots that were established in 2004 and surveyed until 2014. Treatments were randomly assigned through incomplete block design to: (1) thin to 3.7 x 3.7 m spacing;...

The Colorado River is among the most extensively managed river systems in the world. The river’s headwaters are within the Rocky Mountains in the United States. From there, it flows through the arid lands of the Colorado Plateau and the Basin-and-Range to its delta in northwestern Mexico. Here, the river is the only significant water supply in an otherwise starkly arid landscape and has long been called “America’s Nile.” It provides a critical water supply for nearly four million acres of irrigated land, municipal supplies for 30 million people located within and outside the basin, and...

Many studies have investigated the impacts of typhoons on natural vegetation, but the influencing factor of urban vegetation damage from super typhoon is not clear. Therefore, this study investigated the vegetation damage patterns in eight cities affected by Typhoon Mangkhut (the 2nd strongest tropical storm worldwide in 2018 using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from Sentinel-2 images. The vegetation damage maps have an overall accuracy of 97% using the very high-resolution WorldView-3 images as reference data. The results show that (1) The typhoon-induced...

Using a threshold public good experiment, we examine how varying degrees of inequality in resources and differences in risk of loss among players affect the success of group efforts to avoid a common loss. We find that when the poor face greater risk than the rich, contributions and success in reaching the threshold decrease with increasing inequality in funds available. This occurs not because the poor do not make a greater effort when they face higher risk but rather because the rich, who control most of the resources, tend to lower their contributions when they face the lower risk, and...

Phenology is the study of recurring plant and animal life-cycle stages which can be observed across spatial and temporal scales that span orders of magnitude (e.g., organisms to landscapes). The variety of scales at which phenological processes operate is reflected in the range of methods for collecting phenologically relevant data, and the programs focused on these collections. Consideration of the scale at which phenological observations are made, and the platform used for observation, is critical for the interpretation of phenological data and the application of these data to both...

Wildfire risks and losses have increased over the last 100 years, associated with population expansion, land use and management practices, and global climate change. While there have been extensive efforts at modeling the probability and severity of wildfires, there have been fewer efforts to examine causal linkages from wildfires to impacts on ecological receptors and critical habitats. Bayesian networks are probabilistic tools for graphing and evaluating causal knowledge and uncertainties in complex systems that have seen only limited application to the quantitative assessment of...