Treesearch

Long-term survival of a conservation-reliant species requires understanding the impact of threats on population growth rate and the management actions that can help mitigate these threats. We used a threat assessment with expert-elicited estimates to determine the relative effect of each stage-specific threat on the population growth rate of the wood turtle Glyptemys insculpta. In addition, we offered potential management actions that could mitigate these threats and examined the relative cost and benefit of each. The experts responded that predators had the largest effect on hatchling and...

Across the Pacific Northwest’s fire-prone landscapes, where human activity accounts for about 58 percent of all ignitions, socioeconomic factors point to why some communities face repeated blazes and some remain untouched. These patterns raise critical questions about the allocations of wildfire resourcesAfter analyzing more than 104,000 wildfire ignitions across Oregon and Washington from 1992–2018, researchers Jeff Kline, Mindy Crandall, and Caitlyn Reilley reveal a paradox in wildfire risk management. While current risk assessment tools predict higher wildfire hazard in well-resourced...

Seeking to understand controllable stand structure drivers of high burn severity, contingent on weather, 35 candidate predictors were derived from Forest Inventory and Analysis observations and ancillary data on managerially uncontrollable factors—fire history, climate, weather, and topography—within California’s massive 2021 Dixie fire. Logistic regression models were fitted to evaluate the effects of these predictors, with remotely sensed burn severity as the response. Using multiple model selection strategies to choose from among parsimonious predictor subsets that we structured to...

Climate change may affect the distribution and performance of many high latitude species. Plants producing fleshy, edible fruits are ecologically, economically, and socially important components of Alaskan forests, but the potential impacts of climate change on their regional distribution and local abundance remain largely unknown. This study investigated how climate change may impact the regional occupancy and local abundance of blueberry (Vaccinium alaskaenseand V. ovalifolium) and salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) in Southeast Alaskan forests and evaluated environmental correlates of...

Adoption of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) in 1994 marked a pivotal moment in federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest, shifting focus away from intensive timber harvest toward an ecosystem management approach that emphasized late successional and old forest habitat with the creation of a reserve network across moist and dry forest zones. Thirty years after implementation, concerns over accelerating wildfire threats have prompted efforts to adapt the Plan to a warming climate, yet the actual effects of recent fires on NWFP forests are not well understood. In this study, we...

In late June 2021, multiple days of record-breaking heat caused an unprecedented amount of foliage death in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, USA. Portions of tree canopies with healthy green foliage prior to the heat changed to red or orange shortly after the event. The change in foliage color could be readily seen in satellite imagery and was corroborated as foliar death (heat scorch) by aerial surveys and extensive observations on the ground. To better understand the patterns and processes driving foliar death, we used satellite imagery to identify 293,546 ha of forest, or ~4.7% of...

Whitebark pine (WBP) is a federally threatened species that is easily killed by fire but also dependent on fire. In WPB forests, prescribed burning and mechanical fuel treatments can reduce competition from shade-tolerant conifers, improve vigor of surviving WBP, create openings to foster regeneration of WPB seedlings, and mitigate the risk of large, high-severity wildfires. Burning in WBP stands requires careful planning to avoid killing reproductively mature, cone-bearing WBP, as many of these may have some level of genetic resistance to the exotic pathogen that causes white pine blister...

Nonmarket valuation surveys are designed to ask the who, what, when, where and why for a population of interest to understand preferences for environmental goods. Recent declines in survey response rates and high costs associated with traditional survey modes (e.g., mail), along with recent advances in online sampling have led to increased use of non-probability sample frames. This raises an important question for stated preference surveys about potential differences in willingness to pay (WTP) based on data collected by probability versus nonprobability samples. We develop a layered,...

Public forests offer a variety of outdoor recreation activities that enhance participants’ well-being, yet participation remains low among ethnic minorities in the United States. These groups face multiple barriers, including limited information, transportation and financial constraints, safety concerns, fear of discrimination, and wildlife-related anxieties, which are often shaped by broader structural and cultural contexts. While understanding of these barriers is improving, gaps persist in conceptualizing the cognitive, social, and structural factors that influence forest recreation...

U.S. laws and policies have implicitly and explicitly sought to use forests to benefit the nation and adjacent rural communities through a social contract, whereby forest harvest supports community stability. However, the forest industry in the Pacific Northwest experienced a supply shock in the 1990s with the reduction in federal harvest and the creation of the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), which occurred against a backdrop of changing investments across the forest and broader manufacturing industries. This study gathers, queries, and analyzes data from multiple sources to examine how...