Treesearch

Emissions from a stand replacement prescribed burn were sampled using an unmanned aircraft system (UAS, or “drone”) in Fishlake National Forest, Utah, U.S.A. Sixteen flights over three days in June 2019 provided emission factors for a broad range of compounds including carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), nitric oxide (NO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), particulate matter < 2.5 μm in diameter (PM2.5), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) including carbonyls, black carbon, and elemental/organic carbon. To our knowledge, this is the first UAS-based emission sampling for a fire of this magnitude...

The intent of this article is to raise awareness about an underutilized funding mechanism that possesses the capacity to help tribal and federal land management agencies meet their goal of restoring fire-adapted ecosystems to historic conditions in the American Southwest. We attempt to achieve this through an exploration of the Reserved Treaty Rights Lands (RTRL) program and how it has been used to implement collaborative fuel management projects on National Forest lands. RTRL is a funding program administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) that is designed to protect natural and...

Forest harvest, climate change, and their interaction can alter catchment peak discharges, which have ramifications for channel geomorphology and water quality. Catchments in the boreal-temperate transition zone may be especially vulnerable to these factors. We developed a new approach to peak flow analysis using two longterm, paired catchment experiments in that landscape at the Marcell Experimental Forest (MEF) in northcentral Minnesota. We investigated how forest cover change affects the magnitude, occurrence probability, event decoupling, and seasonal decoupling of annual maximum peak...

Where they are present in catchments, peatlands are a dominant source of dissolved organic matter (DOM) to surrounding waterways due, in part, to high production rates. Despite the preponderance of peatlands in northern latitudes and expected peatland vulnerability to climate change, little is known about peatland DOM degradation relative to a more comprehensive understanding of degradation when DOM is sourced from upland-dominated catchments. We compared DOM biodegradability of various sources of stream water in two catchments having peatlands (22%–33% of the area) surrounded by upland...

The limitations on prescribed burning are numerous, but fire's ecological role in shaping the health and integrity of our forests is incredibly important. Browsers, such as domesticated goats, prefer to consume woody species. People can use goats and other browsers to help manage ecological communities that are degraded by nonnative invasive shrubs and vines or located in the wildland– urban interface or where smoke impacts are considerable. Furthermore, browsers could supplement prescribed burning by treating forest stands in "off years" or outside of typical burn windows.

Oak (Quercus) is a fire-adapted genus that has assumed dominance in forests, woodlands, and savannas over thousands of years during periods of frequent fire in North America (fig. 1). Fire has played an important and sustaining role in regeneration, competitive dynamics, rise to overstory dominance, and ecosystem structure and function in oak-dominated ecosystems. Oak and pine (Pinus) were highly soughtafter timber species during the initial logging boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, prized for their high quality and the diversity of forest products made from them during a...

The atmospheric environment surrounding wildland fires is often extremely turbulent, characterized by varying wind speeds and directions (that is, wind gusts and vortices) associated with the ambient atmosphere or with fire-induced perturbations of the atmosphere. These turbulent circulations can have direct and indirect impacts on how wildland fires spread across landscapes and how fire emissions are transported and dispersed away from combustion zones (Forthofer and Goodrick 2011; Heilman and others 2019). Connections between fire behavior, smoke plume dynamics, and atmospheric turbulence...

Beaver-related restoration is a process-based strategy that seeks to address wide-ranging ecological objectives by reestablishing dam building in degraded stream systems. Although the beaver-related restoration has broad appeal, especially in water-limited systems, its effectiveness is not yet well documented. In this article, we present a process-expectation framework that links beaver-related restoration tactics to commonly expected outcomes by identifying the set of process pathways that must occur to achieve those expected outcomes. We explore the contingency implicit within this...

Identifying the signs and symptoms of pathogens, insects, and other biotic and abiotic agents provides valuable information about the absolute and relative impacts of different types of damage across the forest landscape. In the USA, damage collection protocols have been included in various forms since the initiation of state-level forest surveys in the early twentieth century; however, changes in the protocols over time have made it difficult for the data to be used to its full potential. This article outlines differences in protocols across inventory regions, changes in protocols over...

Community and stakeholder engagement is increasingly recognized as essential to science at the nexus of food, energy, and water systems (FEWS) to address complex issues surrounding food and energy production and water provision for society. Yet no comprehensive framework exists for supporting best practices in community and stakeholder engagement for FEWS. A review and meta‐synthesis were undertaken of a broad range of existing models, frameworks, and toolkits for community and stakeholder engagement. A framework is proposed that comprises situational awareness of the FEWS place or...