Treesearch

Temporal changes in the hydrologic and mechanical behavior of burned slopes result in changes in post-wildfire slope stability. The lack of long-term monitoring data on landscape recovery hinders our understanding of the interdependencies between wildfire-induced alterations in soil and vegetation properties, near-surface processes, and landslides. This study presents results from a 4-year field monitoring project of soil water retention and the corresponding long-term changes in landslide susceptibility after the 2019 Williams Flats Wildfire on the Colville Indian Reservation, WA, USA....

The boreal forests of Eurasia form the largest contiguous terrestrial biome in the world, providing numerous ecosystem functions and services for human societies. Temperatures are increasing most rapidly in high northern latitudes, altering tree growth and competition dynamics, and modifying disturbance regimes. The effect of these cumulative changes on the ecosystem functions provided by boreal forests is difficult to predict. We used the process-based LANDIS-II forest landscape model to evaluate how climate change and timber harvesting will interact to alter the production of ecosystem...

The evolution of next-generation flexible, stretchable, and conformal microrobotics hinges significantly on advances in fabrication methods. There is a need to enhance the scalability of actuator feature dimensions and to increase the design versatility. This study demonstrates the additive manufacturing of soft multi-stimulus thermomechanical actuators based on a composite of transition metal carbide (TMC, MXene) and cellulose nanofiber (CNF) nanomaterials using aerosol jet printing (AJP) for scalable/customizable actuation. Aqueous MXene-CNF films with tunable electrothermal and photother...

Wildland fuels are fundamental variables in modeled predictions of fire behavior and effects. In forest ecosystems, accumulated forest floor layers, including recently fallen litter and highly decomposed organic material (i.e., duff), often constitute most surface fuel—biomass and stored carbon. Associated error in estimated litter and duff biomass can thus propagate to major sources of uncertainty in predicted fire effects, including tree mortality and smoke production. Distributions of forest floor biomass are difficult to measure, and estimates of litter and duff biomass typically...

This dataset provides estimates of aboveground dry woody biomass density (AGBD) for high northern latitude forests at a 30-m spatial resolution for the year 2020, accounting for >30% of global forest area. The estimates were derived with state-of-the-art earth observation datasets collected from space, including lidar observations from NASA's ICESat-2 and imagery from NASA's Harmonized Landsat/Sentinel-2 project. They are designed for circumpolar boreal-wide mapping from local to global scales and provide the northern component of global forest structure estimates, to which complementary...

Climate projections suggest ecosystems could face drastic changes due to global climate change, including more severe and frequent droughts than those recorded in the last century. Paleoclimatic series provide more extensive information than that available with instrumental records, allowing for the analysis of trends and recurrence of extreme events over a longer time periods. The objective of this research was to reconstruct the precipitation variability for southwestern Chihuahua, based on the tree-ring records of Pinus arizonica Engelm. and to assess the influence of ocean atmospheric...

Ecologists increasingly recognize that novel computational approaches are critical for effectively addressing the ongoing climate and biodiversity crises. Some of the century’s most substantive methodological developments are in artificial intelligence (AI), including generative AI (GenAI) as well as classical AI and machine learning (ML) approaches, which collectively have spurred advances across all fields of science. In ecology, AI has already been leveraged for diverse applications, ranging from large-scale image recognition for monitoring to conservation decision-making in complex...

Estimating population demographic parameters and habitat relationships is central to recovery planning for imperiled species. These parameters and relationships are often unavailable for rare and elusive species but are necessary to inform their conservation and management. The Humboldt marten (Martes caurina humboldtensis) is a subspecies of the Pacific marten that was historically distributed in coastal forests in California and Oregon, was extirpated from more than 95 % of its historical distribution, and is listed as endangered in California and federally listed as threatened. To...

Background: Understanding fire regimes is important for developing conservation strategies for drought-tolerant species with serotine cones; although, no fire-frequency studies have been undertaken in Pinus greggii a serotine species. Hypotheses: Fire occurrence in Pinus greggii stands are related to climatic conditions prior to and during the fire year, but fire regimes have changed in the last two decades induced by anthropogenic disturbances changing the fire regime. Studied species: Pinus greggii Engelm. Descriptive statistics of the fire regime. Superposed Epoch Analysis. Study site...

Rangelands are extensive ecosystems, providing important ecosystem services while undergoing continuous change. As a result, improved monitoring technologies can help better characterize vegetation change. Satellite remote sensing has proven effective in this regard, tracking vegetation dynamics at broad and fine scales. We leveraged the spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution of Sentinel-2 satellites to estimate fractional cover and canopy gap across rangelands of the western United States. We produced annual, 10 m spatial resolution estimates of fractional cover and canopy gap size...