Treesearch

An increasing threat to U.S. waterways is the establishment and spread of invasive and injurious fishes. A species may be designated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) as federally “injurious” under the Lacey Act (18 U.S.C. 42) either if that species causes harm (injury) without establishing and spreading (not invasive), or if that species causes harm after establishment and spread (invasive). Species designated as injurious are prohibited from being imported, which is a highly effective way of preventing invasions by nonnative species. We developed a decision-support, risk...

Western larch forests are iconic in the interior northwest, and here we document the preemptive steps that scientists and managers are taking to steward these forests into the future. Changing climate is forecast to have acute and chronic impacts on growth and disturbance in western larch forests. A group of scientists and managers in the northern Rocky Mountains have teamed up with the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change Network in an experiment to proactively manage forests for climate adaptation. The collaborative group developed a gradient of adaptation treatments (i.e., resistance...

Numerical simulations of laboratory-scale experiments, with no wind imposed, were performed for fuel bed slopes ranging from 0° to 45°. The implementation of a vertical symmetry plane (SP) placed, span-wise, along the middle of the computational domain, was assessed as an approach to reduce computational cost. The simulations were performed with Wildland-urban interface Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS). The experimental trends of the compared quantities were reproduced well by the simulations. Radiative heat transfer is the dominant mechanism of heating for slope angles between 0° and 22°,...

Aim: A historically benign insect herbivore, Matsucoccus macrocicatrices, has recently been linked to dieback and mortality of eastern white pine (Pinus strobus L.). Previous reports indicated that its native range was restricted to New England, USA and southeastern Canada. Now, the insect occurs throughout an area extending from the putative native range, southward to Georgia, and westward to Wisconsin. Our goal was to evaluate whether its current distribution was due to recent introductions consistent with invasion processes. We considered two hypotheses: (a) if recent expansion into...

The context in which trees and forests grow in cities is highly variable and influences the provision of ecological, social, and economic benefits. Understanding the spatial extent, structure, and composition of forests is necessary to guide urban forest policy and management, yet current forest assessment methodologies vary widely in scale, sampling intensity, and focus. Current definitions of the urban forest include all trees growing in the urban environment, and have been translated to the design of urban forest assessments. However, such broad assessments may aggregate types of urban...

In cities across the world, urban environmental stewardship efforts are increasingly popular activities that citizens and non-governmental organizations take to address and improve the environmental health and quality of life of their urban environment. Urban environmental stewardship is defined as the act of civic groups of conserving, managing, monitoring, advocating for, and educating the public about a wide range of quality of life issues in urban area through, for example, tree planting, stream restoration, education campaigns, water quality monitoring, to name a few. Traditionally...

Efficient and effective wildland fire response requires interregional coordination of suppression resources. We developed a mathematical model to examine how scarce resources are shared. Best-fit models describe regional resource allocation according to driving risk factors. By regressing a linear system of ordinary differential equations with GIS-data for demand predictors like suppression resource use, ongoing fire activity, fire weather metrics, accessibility, and population density onto pre-smoothed Resource Ordering Status System (ROSS) wildfire personnel and equipment requests, we...

Previously burned areas can influence the occurrence, extent, and severity of subsequent wildfires, which may influence expenditures on large fires. We develop a conceptual model of how interactions of fires with previously burned areas may influence fire management, fire behavior, expenditures, and test hypotheses using regression models of wildfire size and suppression expenditures. Using a sample of 722 large fires from the western United States, we observe whether a fire interacted with a previous fire, the percent area of fires burned by previous fires, and the percent perimeter...

Documenting biodiversity and wildlife behavior is time‐consuming and potentially invasive. Remotely placed cameras often are used to increase sampling and minimize disturbance of focal animals. Such wildlife monitoring programs can entail numerous and lengthy videos requiring massive amounts of time to analyze their content. We evaluated the efficacy of a computer program, MotionMeerkat (http://benweinstein.weebly.com/motionmeerkat.html), for automated detection of motion in 21 continuous, 3‐hour‐long videos monitoring woodpecker (Picidae) nest cavities during 2016 in Washington, USA. The...

Wildland-urban interface (WUI) risk assessment is about how wildfires and human communities interact at the landscape level. By spatially mapping factors that influence the likelihood and intensity of wildfires burning into communities, more effective mitigation and response strategies may be implemented.