This capstone report provides an overview of the emergence of the bigleaf maple sugaring industry in Oregon. This report consists of a literature review and three case studies. The literature review compiles information relevant to bigleaf maple sugaring within the wider context of maple sugaring in North America. The three...
We sampled vegetation, bryophytes, lichens, environment, and stand dynamics in 56 plots in the Swan Valley, Montana in 1975-1978. The data include complete inventory of trees in 375 m2 plots, with whole-plot ocular estimates of plant cover by species, transect sampling of the ground layer bryophytes and lichens with microplots,...
Native bees are critically important organisms that support biodiversity and crop production via their pollination services. Wildfires in temperate conifer forests can increase bee abundance and flowering plant density due to increased light exposure, but little information is available regarding how wildfire severity influences provisioning to bee offspring, which is...
Contemporary forest management involves a more extensive and diverse suite of management objectives than was the case throughout much of the Twentieth Century. Heightened public and political awareness of local and global biodiversity decline, and interest in arresting these trends, has increased the emphasis on broad-based biodiversity conservation as an...
This classification is an update of the 2004 classification of native vegetation of Oregon by Kagan, Christy, Murray and Titus. As before, this classification lists the native plant associations known to occur in Oregon, and includes both successional and climax vegetation types that were part of the presettlement landscape of...
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...
Contemporary fire effects are raising concerns about the resistance and resilience of dry mixed-conifer forests to large wildfires. Fire refugia – unburned or low-severity patches within fire perimeters – are understudied components of post-fire mosaics that may be key drivers of forest recovery following high-severity fire. Little is known about...
Deciduous shrubs are an integral component of mixed conifer forests of the interior Pacific Northwest by providing structural complexity, forage, and niche habitat. Currently, these species are under pressure from high levels of ungulate herbivory and forest management activities such as fuels reduction treatments. Ungulate herbivory is influential in the...
Black bears (Ursus americanus) in western Oregon and Washington peel bark from conifers in early spring to forage on the sugar-rich phloem and cambial tissues. This provides important energy at a time when similarly attractive forage is scarce. Bears often damage Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) trees in stands that are intensively...
The application of modern land management practices beginning at the turn of the 20th century is widely believed to have dramatically transformed forest landscapes of the inland Pacific Northwest. Restoring historical conditions to make forests resilient to future climate and disturbance regimes is a major goal of federal forest managers....
Premise of research. We sought to determine the role of flowering in recovery of understory herbs from a major disturbance and to determine the effects of plant and environmental factors on flowering patterns.
Methodology. We counted flowering and nonflowering shoots in permanent plots eight to 10 times over a 30-year period for...
Heliotropium foliatum and Tournefortia humilis are transferred to Euploca Nutt. respectively as Euploca foliata comb. n. and Euploca humilis comb. n. A collection from Guyana has been recently identified as Euploca humistrata, a species previously considered a Brazilian endemic. A collection from French Guiana documents for the first time the...
Landscape fire succession models (LFSMs) predict spatially–explicit interactions between vegetation
succession and disturbance, but these models have yet to fully integrate ungulate herbivory as a driver of
their processes. We modified a complex LFSM, FireBGCv2, to include a multi-species herbivory module,
GrazeBGC. The system is novel in that it explicitly...
Invasion by non-native plants into natural areas is an important component of
global change that threatens biodiversity and ecosystem structure and function.
Mountains are currently among the least invaded ecosystems, however, these
biodiversity hotspots are increasingly under threat of exotic plant invasion.
Evaluation of plant species distribution patterns in mountain...
Intensive forest management (IFM, dense conifer plantings and herbicide applications) may alter the characteristics of early seral plant communities that function as major habitat resources for a host of wildlife species, including cervid herbivores such as Cervus elaphus and Odocoileus hemionus. Such large herbivores can also substantially affect plant community...
To measure organismal coherence in a pelagic ecosystem, we used moored sensors to describe the vertical dynamics of each step in the food chain in shelf waters off the west shore of Oahu, Hawaii. Horizontally extensive, intense aggregations of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and micronekton exhibited strong diel patterns in abundance and...
Ungulates exert a strong influence on the composition and diversity of vegetation communities. However, little is known about how ungulate browsing pressure interacts with episodic disturbances such as fire and stand thinning. We assessed shrub responses to variable browsing pressure by cattle and elk in fuels treated (mechanical removal of...
Controlling competing vegetation with the application of herbicides and increased seedling size at planting has been shown to increase seedling survival and growth. These two important reforestation tools have often been studied independently of each other, limiting comparisons that can be made between them. This study utilized a factorial treatment...
An experiment was conducted to evaluate the influence of forest fuels reduction on diet quality, botanical composition, relative preference, and foraging efficiency of beef cattle grazing at different stocking rates. A split plot factorial design was used, with whole plots (3 ha) being fuel reduced or no treatment (control), and...
The structure and composition of mixed-conifer forest (MCF) in central Oregon has been altered by fire exclusion and logging. The resulting increased density, spatial contagion, and loss of fire resistant trees decrease the resiliency of this ecosystem to fire, drought, and insects. The historical and current composition and structure of...