Sudden Oak Death (SOD) is a forest disease caused by the oomycete pathogen Phytophthora ramorum, and infects trees in the Western United States and Europe. This generalist pathogen can infect over 130 species of plants, and causes rapid mortality in tree species in the Fagaceae. Sexual reproduction is thought to...
Biological invasions threaten native biodiversity, alter ecosystem function, and are a major cause of economic losses across the planet. The most impactful invaders alter disturbance regimes and initiate state shifts to outside the historical range of variability of the ecosystem. Concern for ecological and economic losses has prompted a rapid...
The sustainable use of wood for rail ties requires chemical treatment to increase service life and maintain structural integrity. Treatment can only be applied after lengthy air-seasoning to reduce moisture content in wood, but seasoning leaves ties exposed to attack by decay fungi for up to a year. One factor...
As the global demand for natural resources increases, more land will be intensively managed for the production of commodities such as timber, with potential consequences to biodiversity, ecological functioning and ecosystem services provided to society. Although there is strong consensus that intensive land management practices can negatively affect biodiversity, less...
Spatially explicit maps of habitat relationships have proven to be valuable tools for conservation and management applications including evaluating how and which species may be impacted by large scale climate change, ongoing fragmentation of habitat, and local land-use practices. Studies have turned to remote sensing datasets as a way to...
Differences in the chemical composition of calcified structures can be used to reveal natal origins, connectivity, metapopulation structure, and reconstruct the environmental history or movement patterns of many marine organisms. Sharks, skates, and rays (elasmobranchs) lack the calcified structures, known as otoliths, that are typically used for geochemical studies of...
The National Park Service initiated a backcountry campsite restoration project
in 1987 to restore native vegetation on severely degraded campsites in three subalpine
lake basins in Yosemite National Park. Restoration treatments included soil
scarification, transplanting, manual seeding and site protection. Eight of the treated
campsites were monitored in 1990 to...
Forests in the Pacific Northwest receive very little nitrogen through atmospheric deposition and thus studying the nitrogen cycle in this region can provide insights into how the unpolluted nitrogen cycle functions. I examined the fate of organic nitrogen versus inorganic nitrogen and the effect of tamlins on N retention by...
Reforestation-based restoration of severely burnt plantations is one of the primary management activities following wildfire on U.S. federal lands. Restoration effects on early-seral plant and cryptogam communities have not been documented. The objectives of this study were, in severely burnt plantations two to four years post-fire, to examine the: (1)...