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Timber for housing and shelter. Fruit, berries and bark for sustenance and health. Wood for heating and cooking, shipbuilding, and arts and crafts. Without trees, there would be no society as we know it. And the more society advances technologically, the more apparent its innate connection to the forest, and the more evident the related…
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Scientists created the Carbon Dashboard to make data more easily useable by planning and NEPA specialists. They also collaborated with several regions to create carbon templates for use in project planning and forest management plans.
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Despite beetle outbreaks significantly altering forest structure and composition, lynx still occupy these subalpine forests and are reproducing.
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Customizing harvest systems and logistics at the landscape scale improved the safety and efficiency of the harvests and expanded options for biomass utilization while also meeting ecological objectives.
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In the Southwest United States, many ponderosa pine forests no longer resemble the pre-European settlement forests that were adapted to frequent, low-severity wildfires. The cumulative effects of fire suppression, livestock grazing, high-grading, and insect outbreaks have created conditions that frequently result in high-severity wildfires. Thinning treatments are one method to restore forest health and resiliency.…
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Many tools that identify wildfire risks and hazards across the landscape assume that all houses and properties within a community have the same level of risk. However, there are often substantial differences across properties, such as building materials and distance to overgrown vegetation. Tools that don’t account for parcel-level risk cannot provide the details necessary…
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The 741 million acres of forestland in the United States play a role in mitigating the effects of climate change by sequestering nearly 16 percent of the atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions produced annually in our country. Reducing the conversion of forestland to other uses and planting even more trees, whether through afforestation or reforestation, would…
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Brown root rot (caused by Phellinus noxius) and myrtle rust (caused by Austropuccinia psidii) are natural disturbances in their native tropical and subtropical forest ecosystems. A tree infected with either fungal pathogen becomes unhealthy and likely dies, sometimes within 3 months. These pathogens are threatening forest ecosystems around the world as they spread through international…
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Elk are an iconic species in the Pacific Northwest. The animals are valued as a cultural resource by American Indian tribes, and elk viewing and hunting bring economic and social benefits to many rural communities. Elk forage on grasses, shrubs, and other early-seral vegetation. As timber harvests have declined on federal land in the region…
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Wildfires were a frequent source of disturbance in forests of the Western United States prior to Euro-American settlement. Following a series of catastrophic wildfires in the Northern Rockies in 1910, the U.S. Forest Service adopted a broad wildfire suppression policy that has resulted in forests thick with small trees. These crowded trees compete for nutrients…
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Municipal water managers need to know if water will be reliably available from watersheds. Civil engineers need to calculate stream discharge to construct bridges to withstand 100-year floods. A hypothesis proposed in 1997 by Gordon Grant, a research hydrologist with the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, underlies a method for getting this information…
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Writings by Andrea Watts 