Treesearch

The reliable measurement of cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) particle morphology is vital for ongoing CNC production optimization and application development. A semi-automatic image analysis program, SMART-AFM, was developed for CNC particle size measurements from atomic force microscopy (AFM) images and subsequently used to analyze the AFM images acquired from four laboratories that participated in the interlaboratory comparison (ILC) study by Bushell et al.. SMART-AFM demonstrated a 40 times faster analysis compared to the manual approach used in the ILC. A detailed image-to-image analysis...

What key characteristics of forest sites and trails contribute to enjoyable and healthy immersive nature experiences for visitors? Previous research has helped identify the conceptual structure and criteria important in facilitating successful experiences, but there remains a knowledge gap in translating this information into operational guidelines. To address this gap, the present work used a descriptive inventory approach combining field research with a variety of secondary data to develop a protocol for assessing four site level criteria (beauty, integrity, tranquility, accessibility)...

The SSN2 R package provides tools for spatial statistical modeling, parameter estimation, and prediction on stream (river) networks. SSN2 is the successor to the SSN R package (Ver Hoef, Peterson, Clifford, & Shah, 2014), which was archived alongside broader changes in the R-spatial ecosystem (Nowosad, 2023) that included 1) the retirement of rgdal (Bivand, Keitt, & Rowlingson, 2021), rgeos (Bivand & Rundel, 2020), and maptools (Bivand & Lewin-Koh, 2021) and 2) the lack of active development of sp (Bivand, Pebesma, & Gómez-Rubio, 2013). SSN2 maintains compatibility with the input data file...

Aim: Fundamental to species conservation efforts is the development of accurate distribution models. Doing so is challenging for many stream organisms, where limited funding may necessitate the compilation of incidental observations from multiple sources which lack an overall sampling design and are often spatially clustered. We demonstrate the application of specialised spatial-stream- network models (SSNMs), which incorporate autocorrelation among observations and have the potential to improve species distribution models for many organisms. Location: Rocky Mountains in west-central North...

Area burned by wildfire has increased in western US forests and elsewhere over recent decades coincident with warmer and drier fire seasons. However, high-severity fire - fire that kills all or most trees - is arguably a more important metric of fire activity given its destabilizing influence on forest ecosystems and direct and indirect impacts to human communities. Here, we quantified area burned and area burned severely in western US forests from 1985 to 2022 and evaluated trends through time. We also assessed key relationships between area burned, extent and proportion burned severely,...

Accurate prediction of forest fire spread is a critical management and scientific challenge as the world adapts to rapidly changing fire regimes. We reconstructed 5,400 daily burned area progression maps for 196 U.S. Northern Rocky Mountain wildfires (2012-2021) and used machine learning to estimate daily fire growth given local weather, hydroclimate, fuels and topography. Optimized models explained 36% of the variation in daily fire growth, increasing to 56% when an index of fire activity the previous day was included. Soil moisture and plant hydraulic stress were the dominant predictors...

The rising introduction of invasive species through trade networks threatens biodiversity and ecosystem services. Yet, we have a limited understanding of how transportation networks determine spatiotemporal patterns of range expansion. This knowledge gap may stem from two reasons. First, current analytical models fail to integrate the invader’s life-history dynamics with heterogeneity in human-mediated dispersal patterns. Second, classical statistical methods often fail to provide reliable estimates of model parameters, such as the time and place of species introduction and life-history...

Fire regimes are context-dependent, as are the ways that animals respond. However, most information on animal responses to fire comes from short-term local field studies, which are hard to extrapolate across large areas for fire management while also capturing spatial variation. To address this challenge, we modeled data from eBird to map the direction, magnitude, and importance of fire regime associations at 27-km resolution across the ranges of six bird species used to guide management decisions in the US: red-cockaded woodpecker (Leuconotopicus borealis), Bachman's sparrow (Peucaea...

Climate change is reducing the extent of cold aquatic habitats and their unique biodiversity in mountain areas. However, a variety of cold rocky landforms (CRLs) are thermally buffered and feed cold springs (<2 °C) that may represent climate refugia for cold-adapted organisms. These landforms, hitherto overlooked by freshwater research, include rock glaciers, debris-covered glaciers, talus slopes, protalus ramparts, and young moraines. Here, we investigated the warm-season water temperature of 228 springs from clean (ice) glaciers, CRLs, and reference slopes (not sourced by any of these...

Lamprey molecular phylogenies to date have relied on mitochondrial (mt) DNA sequence data, and there has long been recognition that a robust molecular phylogeny of this ancient group of vertebrates - with relatively few phylogenetically informative morphological characters - will require the use of a wider range of genes, particularly nuclear genes (e.g., Lang et al. 2009; Potter et al. 2015; Docker and Hume 2019). Hughes et al. (2025) performed this long awaited phylogenomic analysis to assess phylogenetic relationships of lampreys, and estimated divergence time and diversification rates...