Treesearch

The 2012 Planning Rule requires that National Forest planning teams provide for a transparent, collaborative process that allows effective public participation, but there is no roadmap for how to be successful. A recent General Technical Report describes how Q methodology can collect stakeholder input in a way that is engaging, thorough, and scientifically rigorous. This process can help forest planners identify different perspectives as well as areas of agreement by stakeholders, including the public.

Mexican spotted owl habitat varies by geographic location. In the Sacramento Mountains, percent cover of mixed-conifer forest was strongly associated with the likelihood of Mexican spotted owl occurrence, whereas topography was key in the Mogollon Plateau.

A comprehensive general technical report summarizes essential information on the status and ecology of the Mexican spotted owl found in the Upper Gila Mountains Recovery Unit which supports a majority of the known population. Many of the recommendations in the 2011 report were adopted when the Mexican Spotted Owl Recovery Plan created in 1995 was updated in 2012. Recent research adds to the existing knowledge with improved understanding about owl demography and ecology, spatial distribution and connectivity of owl habitat, wildfire trends in owl habitat, and regional differences in ecology.

The FireCLIME VA tool, found at https://swfireclime.org/ vulnerability-assessment, is a new resource that allows land managers to compare management strategies under various climate scenarios and to gauge the potential effectiveness of those strategies for reducing undesirable impacts of climate on wildfire regimes and resulting impacts of wildfire on natural ecosystems.

New translation process corrects past translation error and allows FVS to directly read FIA data without the need for data conversion by the FVS user. Managers and researchers can now more easily and effectively assess the status and trends of a wide variety of forest types over large areas. They can evaluate the outcomes of possible future management scenarios. Data availability in the new format allows users to project data from FIA plots, subplots, or conditions.

Determining the best strategy to ensure the survival of an endangered desert plant species near the Utah-Arizona border required combining many approaches including genetic and lifecycle analysis, field experiments, and habitat modeling based on high-resolution drone imagery.

The Landscape Change Monitoring System (LCMS) is an important new dataset and tool that allows the user to create landscape scale historical disturbance maps. LCMS combines satellite imagery with other monitoring data to produce annual maps showing change (vegetation loss and vegetation gain), land cover, and land use, generating a “best available” map covering multiple disturbance processes and diverse cover types.

The Lassen and Modoc National Forests are located where the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevada, and the Southern Cascades meet. For forest plan revisions, other science syntheses have focused on the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada and are relevant to the Lassen and Modoc National Forests but do not cover some important ecosystems and topics.

RMRS-GTR-403 is a comprehensive science synthesis of findings from over 1,000 publications. It provides the best available information on the distribution, history, ecology, hydrology, and management of pinyon and juniper woodlands in the Great Basin and on the Colorado Plateau.

A recently published review and synthesis of 78 scientific studies, published from 2000-2019, of stream flow and snowpack response to disturbances reframes our understanding of how forests affect water supply in the semi-arid West.