Stream restoration efforts have increasingly started to focus on management actions that restore ecological function rather than focusing on species-specific habitat needs. Restoration practitioners in the Pacific Northwest have implemented numerous large-scale floodplain restoration projects to restore stream function at the valley scale. Some of these projects attempt to restore...
Natural landscapes around the world have experienced serious loss and degradation, which negatively impacts ecosystem service provision by these landscapes. As a result, there have been serious investments to restore natural capital. However, restoration faces complex trade-offs, such as that between restoration quality, or how closely the restored landscapes resembles...
Habitat restoration projects are vital for recovering ecosystems, but they can be expensive. One way to help justify the price tag is to value the economic benefits provided by the restored habitat. The issue is that many ecosystem services and the flow of benefits they produce are complex, requiring careful...
Land management agencies are faced with decreasing budgets and staff, even as acres in need of restoration treatment are increasing. Rural communities in the West are still suffering from sharp declines in timber harvests since the 1990s and are now contending with wildfires that are increasing in size and severity....
Since 1960 sheep have been used to reduce fuel accumulation on Fort Ord National Monument (FONM) grasslands. From 1997-2019 BLM’s monitoring projects were employed to determine livestock grazing impacts on Coyote Brush, bunchgrasses, and other native and non-native herbaceous vegetation. In 2014, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) determined that...
Marine heatwaves (“MHWs”) are discrete periods of anomalously warm ocean conditions that can lead to shifts in the distribution and abundance of marine organisms. Low-trophic level, pelagic forage species are frequently among those affected by MHWs, often resulting in considerable impacts upon their predators. In the North Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic...
Carnivores have disproportionate effects in ecological systems but understanding their exact influences on ecosystems is a matter of great complexity and debate. Predators directly impact prey by killing them, and indirectly by modifying their behavior in response to predation risk. Yet how species interact, both among members of a carnivore...
As of September 2020, three of the outputs mandated under the Streamflow Restoration Act have been completed. However, little has been done to assess the quality of these plans. By using the Characteristics of Plan Quality That Serve as Evaluation Criteria to evaluate the plans completed so far, this research...
Animal pollination is critical to plant reproduction in agricultural and wildland ecosystems. Much of the production of seeds and fruits in natural areas, which underlie many food webs, depends on pollination services by insects. The taxon responsible for delivering the bulk of these services in most temperate systems is bees....
In the Pacific Northwest, USA, the cumulative impact of human development has caused decades of salmon habitat degradation and the listing of multiple populations under the US Endangered Species Act. As a result, the need for implementation of recovery goals has encouraged the development of an economy focused on salmon...