Treesearch

The Urban National Landowner Survey (UNLS) is a component of the National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS) which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program. The UNLS is charged with collecting information on the property owners and managers in the urban areas across the United States. Information is collected on ownership and land characteristics, property management activities, tree-related concerns on their property, participation in programs and organizations, information sources, opinions on neighborhood and community...

The Urban National Landowners Survey (UNLS) provides information about who owns the trees across America’s urban areas, why they own them, what they have done with them in the past, and what they plan to do with them in the future. The first UNLS was completed for Baltimore, MD, in 2018 and provides estimates for all landowners in the city. Most people in Baltimore valued trees on their property and in their neighborhood evidenced by the following: they agreed that trees make the neighborhood a better place to live, that tree health should be considered during construction, and that good...

Increased frequency, severity, and duration of droughts and increased wildfire severity are impacting many conifer forests globally. Reforestation in these changing disturbance regimes requires tree seedlings capable of establishing in hotter and drier climates. We evaluated the morphological and physiological effects of drought conditioning on second-year ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), western white pine (Pinus monticola), and western larch (Larix occidentalis) seedlings. Treatments included a well-watered control (75% of container capacity) and a water-limited (40% of container...

WEPPcloud - European Union (EU) is an online interface of the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model designed to predict streamflow and sediments in European forested watersheds. Although designed to be run in any location in Europe, its performance has not yet been evaluated against observed data. This study evaluates WEPPcloud - EU's performance in simulating streamflow and suspended sediment yield for two burned catchments, Ermida and Serra de Cima, in continental Portugal during the first year after the fire. The default parameters significantly underestimated streamflow and...

Wildfires accelerate soil erosion. Preventive fuel management and post-fire control measures are two distinct strategies that can be used to mitigate wildfire-induced soil loss with varying effectiveness and costs. Here, we quantified the impacts and effectiveness of pre- versus post-fire treatment strategies on soil loss mitigation. We coupled fire simulations with soil erosion modelling to estimate annual wildfire-induced soil loss for two watersheds in Portugal. We identified optimal treatment locations with the aim of maximizing the reduction in soil loss, and estimated treatment...

Forests are changing rapidly due to drought, disease, wildfire, and forest management, with unknown impacts on snowmelt resources. While hyper-resolution forest hydrology models capture the effects of canopy cover amount and arrangement on snowpack, they are too complex for landscape-scale assessments. Here, we evaluated two statistical approaches to emulate high-resolution (1 m) mechanistic model maps of snow variables for future application in forest management and drew inferences about topographic vs. forest canopy controls. We tested a simple landscape classification using one or more...

The term ‘megafire’ is increasingly used to describe large fires worldwide. We proposed a size-based definition of megafire - fires exceeding 10,000 ha arising from single or multiple related ignition events. A recent perspective in Global Ecology and Biogeography argues against a size-based definition of megafire and suggest that the term is too emotive for scientific use. We highlight that many scientific terms originate from common terms. These terms are often defined once they enter the scientific lexicon, enhancing both scientific understanding and public communication. We argue that...

Fire regimes are changing across the globe, with new wildfire behaviour phenomena and increasing impacts felt, especially in ecosystems without clear adaptations to wildfire. These trends pose significant challenges to the scientific community in understanding and communicating these changes and their implications, particularly where we lack underlying scientific evidence to inform decision-making. Here, we present a perspective on priority directions for wildfire science research—through the lens of academic and government wildfire scientists from a historically wildfire-prone (USA) and...

Nepytia janetae is a previously innocuous non-eruptive species that has recently incurred multiple devastating outbreaks in the American Southwest. We report information on the life cycle, biology, and impact of this species learned during the first 3 known outbreaks in spruce-fir and mixed-conifer forests of the Pinaleño Mountains and White Mountains of Arizona and the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico. N. janetae is a univoltine, autumn- and winter-feeding wasteful defoliator with 3-yr eruptive outbreaks. Outbreaks terminate with parasitism, viral infection, starvation, and in one...

In the Great Basin of the western United States, annual grass invasion has initiated a novel grass-fire cycle that has transformed vast areas of semi-arid shrublands into non-native annual grasslands that now burn frequently. After the initial transformation, the system is so fire prone that it is difficult to find areas that have not burned repeatedly. We evaluated how the ecosystem responds in the absence of repeated fire to determine if management interventions preventing it could be used to restore the native shrubland.We created a regional-scale chronosequence of areas that burned...