Treesearch

Comprehensive monitoring of biodiversity to direct conservation action is foundational to addressing the ongoing biodiversity crisis. As integrative monitoring programs increasingly come online in response to multilateral biodiversity agreements, establishing best practices for optimal design is critical. Appropriately selecting monitoring locations is fundamental for producing robust biodiversity data. Despite extensive development of algorithms to systematically select sites, practical discussions of which algorithm is optimal for different monitoring settings is largely absent from the...

Understanding wildlife responses to human disturbance is essential for developing effective conservation and management strategies. Grizzly bears in the southern Canadian Rocky Mountains face increasing habitat alteration from roads, forest harvest, human settlements, and mining, which can alter the way animals move through the landscape. Deleterious effects on genetic exchange, demographic connectivity, and access to key resources can occur if movements are dramatically altered. We used integrated step-selection functions (iSSF) to model movement and habitat selection for 109 GPS-collared...

Recruitment is the most sensitive plant life stage to environmental filters. Yet, most research linking functional traits to environmental filters has focused on adult plants with little known about early plant traits, their interactions with environmental filters, or their relation to species abundance. Likewise, how such relationships might vary between native and exotic species or influence plant invasion outcomes is unclear. We quantified regeneration traits for 12 native and 12 exotic (naturalized and invasive) forbs and evaluated trait relationships and their associations with...

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis, PIAL) and foxtail pine (P. balfouriana, PIBA) are slow-growing, high-elevation, five-needled pines. Recently, PIAL has experienced significant mortality while PIBA has experienced minimal decline. PIBA exists in two disjunct southern (PIBAS) and northern (PIBAN) populations. Our study compared juvenile physiological and morphological traits between the two species (PIAL, PIBA) and foxtail populations (PIBAN, PIBAS) to investigate mechanisms underlying responses to environmental stressors in their high-elevation environments. We grew four-year-old PIAL and...

Boreal forest and Arctic tundra environments collectively hold the largest percentage of global terrestrial seasonal snow cover. Тhe in-situ snow measurement network is sparse and costly in these remote northern regions. Here, we complement existing snow depth monitoring in Arctic tundra and boreal forest by presenting an extensive (64°N-70°N) snow depth dataset and description of ground-based snow depth measurements collected during the NASA SnowEx Alaska intensive field campaign, March 7-16, 2023. We also report the accuracy of snow depth measurements in shallow boreal forest and Arctic...

Recent disasters showed major gaps in emergency alerting - the process of sending emergency information to communities rapidly - where people with limited-English proficiency (LEP) and auditory or visual (AV) disabilities experience issues receiving alerts in their preferred language or formats. In this paper, we review academic literature, agency reports, and news articles to synthesize barriers and develop best practices for inclusive alerting. The barriers identified include: (1) lack of capacity from agencies distributing alerts and warnings; (2) delay or lack of information in...

Climate change is altering precipitation regimes that control nitrogen (N) cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. In ecosystems exposed to frequent drought, N can accumulate in soils as they dry, stimulating the emission of both nitric oxide (NO; an air pollutant at high concentrations) and nitrous oxide (N2O; a powerful greenhouse gas) when the dry soils wet up. Because changes in both N availability and soil moisture can alter the capacity of nitrifying organisms such as ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and archaea (AOA) to process N and emit N gases, predicting whether shifts in precipitatio...

Designing large-scale fuel reduction programs has increasingly become a complex planning process owing to multifaceted fire management objectives that vary in space and time. In many fire-prone systems, fuel management strategies rely on fuel break networks (FBN) and fuel treatment mosaics (FTM) to mitigate wildfire impacts. While both archetypes are being widely implemented as part of newer fire management initiative, managers must decide how to allocate investments to best achieve desired long-term outcomes. This problem creates a new spatial prioritization paradigm that has long-term...

Knowledge-action gaps (KAGs) are gaps between knowledge and the application of that knowledge, which can result in management actions that are not based on the best available science. Awareness of KAGs and ways to address them are increasing - for example, forming collaborative relationships between scientists and managers to coproduce and apply scientific knowledge and brokering this knowledge with interested parties. Here, we present a new conceptual model that integrates knowledge coproduction with knowledge brokering. We also present a new example of addressing KAGs that involves...

Climate change is contributing to unprecedented rates of ecological transformation worldwide. Shifts in species distributions and altered structural complexity of habitat has implications for ecosystem function and human relationships. The 1964 Wilderness Act was passed to preserve undeveloped large landscapes in their “natural” condition and for the continued recreational, cultural, and spiritual benefit of the people. Nevertheless, wilderness is still vulnerable to the direct and indirect impacts of climate change. Using active management to respond to climate change challenges in...