Treesearch

Improving decision processes and the informational basis upon which decisions are made in pursuit of safer and more effective fire response have become key priorities of the fire research community. One area of emphasis is bridging the gap between fire researchers and managers through development of application-focused, operationally relevant decision support tools. In this paper we focus on a family of such tools designed to characterise the difficulty of suppression operations by weighing suppression challenges against suppression opportunities. These tools integrate potential fire...

Root zone soil moisture (RZSM) is important in sustaining terrestrial ecosystems and water cycling. However, noninvasive mapping of RZSM remains challenging in the field, especially its spatial variability at local scales. We propose a novel method of applying ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) for noninvasive determination of RZSM. First, this method identified coarse root reflections in GPR images to obtain the reflected wave velocity and soil water storage at various locations. Then, the horizontal distributions of soil water storage to different depths were reconstructed using the inverse...

Forests cover a vast area of the United States, 304 million ha or approximately one-third of the Nation’s land area (Smith and others 2009). These forests possess the capacity to provide a broad range of goods and services to current and future generations, to safeguard biological diversity, and to contribute to the resilience of ecosystems, societies, and economies (USDA Forest Service 2011). Their ecological roles include supplying large and consistent quantities of clean water, preventing soil erosion, and providing habitat for a broad diversity of plant and animal species. Their...

Forest insects and diseases are having widespread ecological and economic impacts on the forests of the United States and may represent the most serious threats to the Nation’s forests (Logan and others 2003, Lovett and others 2016, Tobin 2015). Insects and diseases cause changes in forest structure and function, species succession, and biodiversity, which may be considered negative or positive depending on management objectives (Edmonds and others 2011). Nearly all native tree species of the United States are affected by at least one injurycausing insect or disease agent, with exotic...

As a pervasive disturbance agent operating at many spatial and temporal scales, wildland fire is a key abiotic factor affecting forest health both positively and negatively. In some ecosystems, for example, wildland fires have been essential for regulating processes that maintain forest health (Lundquist and others 2011). Wildland fire is an important ecological mechanism that shapes the distributions of species, maintains the structure and function of fire-prone communities, and acts as a significant evolutionary force (Bond and Keeley 2005). At the same time, wildland fires have created...

Although ecologists do not define the term “drought” consistently (Slette and others 2019), one definition that is applicable to forests is that a drought is a period of precipitation deficit that persists long enough to deplete available soil water, leading to impacts on trees and other plants; in some cases, these impacts include plant injury or death (Anderegg and others 2012, Hanson and Weltzin 2000). Under this definition, droughts affect most forests in the United States, but their frequency and intensity vary considerably between geographic regions (Hanson and Weltzin 2000). These...

Building upon the work of Roesch and McWilliams (2007), this paper discusses additional examples of an auxiliary sampling strategy that allows National Forest Inventory (NFI) practitioners to efficiently estimate the attributes of rare events or species. When the rare event is immediately identifiable in the field, such as the tree species itself, a trivial simplification of theory is evident, that being that clusters of networks of trees (of that species) are being sampled by the area-based plot, rather than clusters of individual trees. When this is the case one does not have to think of...

Seeds of Success (SOS) is a national seed collection program led by the Bureau of Land Management. SOS represents the most comprehensive native seed repository in the United States, supporting native plant restoration, management, and research. Since inception in 2000, SOS has collected seeds from over 24,400 native plant populations from ~5,600 taxa from 43 states. Collections include species important to wildlife, pollinators, and indigenous people, and over 10,000 collections have been shared for restoration and research use. We asked how many SOS sites have burned since collection, and...

Every year, the four federal agencies that manage designated wilderness in the United States receive proposals to implement small- and large-scale ecological restorations within the National Wilderness Preservation System. The combination of climate change with other landscape stressors is driving ecological restoration to be one of the single most important, challenging, and potentially litigious wilderness stewardship issues. In addition, different stakeholders may have strongly divergent views about what the right decision should be, and decisions need to go beyond routine technical and...

This Resource Bulletin is part of a series of reports presenting findings from a census of Montana’s primary forest products industry. Part II of the series presents information on the forest products sectors that processed timber and mill residue into finished products in 2014.