Treesearch

The Frye Fire started June 7, 2017, in the Pinaleño Mountains of southeast Arizona. The Pinaleños are host to important resources and assets including Mount Graham International Observatory, recreation residences, a church camp, Forest Service infrastructure, spiritual significance to tribes, and 11 endemic fish and wildlife species. This assessment was stimulated by the need to make sense of the numerous resources and assets within the planning area of the Frye Fire in order to enable quality dialog between the Coronado National Forest and the Incident Management Team. The assessment was...

Prescribed fire is a commonly used land management tool in the southeastern United States. Despite its use, there are several issues that are making land management difficult for private forest landowners. We focus on three of the issues. The first is the increased planting of longleaf pine when prescribed fire is withheld from these plantations for too long, allowing stands to fill in with other species. A second major issue is landowners with upland hardwood stands dominated by oaks. They want oaks but refuse to use fire that would aid in oak regeneration. The third issue is the use of...

Inclusivity and diversity are being increasingly recognized as important factors in the production of scientific knowledge, not only for the sake of equal opportunity, but as necessary to the best quality research (e.g. Feliú-Mójer et al 2018; Poster 2018; Smith et al 2018). However, lack of diversity persists in many if not all scientific fields to varying degrees (e.g. Pérez 2018; Poster 2018), and affects various facets of research and education including the underrepresentation of women in leadership at universities (Smaglik 2018; Hamburg et al. 2018), in the peer-review process...

The Nature Conservancy and the Forest Service, Department of Agriculture have long-term goals to reintroduce fire into U.S. ecosystems at ecologically relevant spatial and temporal scales. Building on decades of collaborative work, a Master Participating Agreement was signed in March 2017 to increase overall fire management capacity through training and education. In October 2017, The Nature Conservancy hosted a cross-boundary fire training, education, research, and restoration-related event for 2 weeks at Sycan Marsh Preserve in Oregon. Eighty people from 15 organizations applied prescribe...

We compared three commonly used sampling methods for estimating coarse woody surface fuel (>7.62 cm diameter) loading: fixed-area plot, planar intersect using one transect, and planar intersect using two transects. Sampling occurred in ponderosa pine/ Douglas-fir (Pinus ponderosa/Pseudotsuga menziesii) dominated stands in the northern Rocky Mountains, USA. These methods commonly have tradeoffs in execution and accuracy that managers must consider. We found fixed-area plot sampling was more likely to capture log occurrence; planar intersect methods estimated zero loading on 23 to 47 percent...

Fences and mulch contribute to the spread of wildland-urban interface fires, acting both as ignition targets and as sources that may ignite nearby objects through direct flame contact and firebrand generation. This paper presents the findings from outdoor experiments that investigated the spread of fire through firebrand spotting from fences and mulch beds near a structure in a wind field. A fence section, mulch bed, or combination was arranged perpendicular to a small structure, with a large fan directing wind toward the structure. After ignition, data were collected on firebrand spotting...

We analyzed the predictive accuracy of rate of fire spread models used operationally in Australia in five different fuel types (grasslands, temperate shrublands, semiarid shrublands, dry eucalypt [Eucalyptus spp.] forests, and conifer forests). This analysis was undertaken by comparing predictions of older models with those of newer models and noting changes in error statistics based on independent evaluation of datasets composed largely of wildfire observations. We observed the newer models to have improved prediction accuracy in four of the five cases over their previous counterparts;...

The status quo approach of addressing wildfire threat in British Columbia is not working. In 2017, wildfires overwhelmed suppression capabilities, burned 1.2 million hectares, and cost $568 million for suppression and immediate rehabilitation. From 2003 to 2017, the Provincial government spent $3.1 billion on direct fire suppression, but only $73.8 million on proactive fuels mitigation in the wildland-urban interface. A holistic, landscape view of this problem and transformative changes to wildfire and forest management are urgently needed to achieve forest and community resilience to...

For the last few decades, the application of biopolymers such as poly(lactic acid, PLA) as an alternative to synthetic polymers in the packaging industry is in great demand. However, to rival the traditional polymers, the barrier properties and antimicrobial activities of PLA need to be adapted to the food packaging requirements. The purpose of this research was to compare the impact of thin-film fabrication techniques in combination with different contents of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) (1–5 wt%) on the barrier and antimicrobial properties of PLA films. The nanocomposite thin films were...

Smaller details of natural history often go undocumented to science if those details are not parts of larger studies, but small details can provide insights that lead to interesting questions about ecological relationships or environmental change. We have compiled recent important observations of distribution and reproduction of fishes and mammals. Included are new distributional records of mammals, and observations of reproduction in several mammals for which few data exist in Arkansas. A rare record of the long-tailed weasel, a species of special concern in Arkansas, is documented from...