Treesearch

The second full remeasurement of the annual inventory of the forests of Vermont was completed in 2017 and covers nearly 4.5 million acres of forest land, with an average volume of over 2,300 cubic feet per acre. The data in this report are based on 1,125 plots located across Vermont. Forest land is dominated by the maple/beech/birch forest-type group, which occupies 71 percent of total forest land area. Of the forest land, 70 percent consists of large diameter trees, 23 percent contains medium diameter trees, and 7 percent contains small diameter trees. The volume of growing stock on...

The Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment uses a combination of land use and land cover data to evaluate trends in the United States land base and project future changes. This publication describes how the RPA Assessment uses the National Resources Inventory, National Land Cover Database, and Forest Inventory and Analysis to support analyses of forest trends. The authors compare and contrast differences in definitions and approaches of these three major data sources and document the recent status and trends of land use and land cover area according to these sources. While the general...

Coupled fire-atmospheric modeling tools are increasingly used to understand the complex and dynamic behavior of wildland fires. Multiple research tools linking combustion to fluid flow use Navier-Stokes numerical solutions coupled to a thermodynamic model to understand fire-atmospheric feedbacks, but these computational fluid dynamics approaches require high-performance computing resources. We present a new simulation tool called QUIC-Fire to rapidly solve these feedbacks by coupling the mature 3-D rapid wind solver QUIC-URB to a physicsbased cellular automata fire spread model Fire-CA....

The second full remeasurement of the annual inventory of the forests of New Hampshire was completed in 2017 and covers more than 4.7 million acres of forest land, with an average volume of over 2,300 cubic feet per acre. The data in this report are based on 1,162 plots located across New Hampshire. Forest land is dominated by the maple/beech/birch forest-type group, which occupies 52 percent of total forest land area. Of the forest land, 64 percent consists of large diameter trees, 25 percent contains medium diameter trees, and 11 percent contains small diameter trees. The volume of...

Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this risk is a collective action problem requiring landowners and stakeholders within multi-ownership landscapes to plan and implement coordinated restoration treatments. Our research question is: how can we promote collective action to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-resilient forests in the American West? To address this question we draw on collective action theory to produce an environmental...

An approach to community-based forestry (CBF) on federal forestlands in the western United States consists of a number of informal civil society institutions for communities to better organize internally and interact with government. We review the body of research on this topic, which has an explicit focus on the three interlinked aspects of democratic governance practiced to provide community benefits and ecological sustainability. We situate its prominent concepts and themes relative to the global literature on CBF, and initiate new conversation about what CBF may mean within the context...

In conservation paradigms, management actions for umbrella species also benefit co‐occurring species because of overlapping ranges and similar habitat associations. The greater sage‐grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is an umbrella species because it occurs across vast sagebrush ecosystems of western North America and is the recipient of extensive habitat conservation and restoration efforts that might benefit sympatric species. Biologists' understanding of how non‐target species might benefit from sage‐grouse conservation is, however, limited. Reptiles, in particular, are of interest in...

Urban forestry professionals can use online tools to learn a lot about a site before a field visit. For example, Google Street ViewTM (GSV) provides street-level panoramic photographs that can be used to preview a street tree that is slated for maintenance or removal so that an arborist can anticipate what equipment will be needed in the field. Using street-level imagery, a person may be able to record the tree's street address, identify its species, estimate its size, note overhead wire conflicts, and so on. If this is possible for one tree, could we reliably use online resources like GSV...

After a more than a century of fighting to keep fire out of forests, reintroducing it is now an important management goal. Yet changes over the past century have left prescribed burning with a big job to do. Development, wildfire suppression, rising global temperatures, extended droughts, exotic species invasions, and longer fire seasons add complexity to using this practice.Managers must consider how often, how intensely, and what time of year to burn; for insights they often look to how and when fires burned historically. However, attempting to mimic historical wildfires that burned in...

To inform future restoration efforts, we reviewed the known effects of fire and habitat management and restoration on hummingbirds in four key habitat types in North America. We examined seven species that most commonly occur west of the Rocky Mountains: Rufous (Selasphorus rufus), Calliope (Selasphorus calliope), Broad-tailed (Selasphorus platycercus), Costa’s (Calypte costae), Black-chinned (Archilochus alexandri), Anna’s (Calypte anna), and Allen’s (Selasphorus sasin). Our review found that most western hummingbird species respond positively to wild or prescribed fire in forested and...