Correction: We discovered two typos and a change in a sentence needed in our published manuscript. Regarding the typos: timber estimates in Section 2 of the NWFP’s Long-Term Objectives should have been 2.34 million cubic meters annually instead of 234 million cubic meters annually and ~1.78 million cubic meters instead...
Tillamook Bay is the second largest estuary on the Oregon coast, and concerns have been raised whether human induced impacts have been responsible for the perceived increase in sedimentation rates during the past century. Major land-use practices within the five watersheds of the Bay include logging, forest fires, the construction...
Anthropogenic land-cover change and climate change are the major drivers of the steep loss of avian biodiversity in past decades. Loss of avian biodiversity is predicted to result in the reduction of ecosystem services and ecological functions. Identifying avian population changes and the drivers of these trajectories is essential for...
The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) shifted federal lands management from a focus on timber production to ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. The plan established a network of conservation reserves and an ecosystem management strategy on ~10 million hectares from northern California to Washington State, USA, within the range of...
Full Text:
. Kim Nelson 6, Barry R. Noon 7, David Olson 8 and JamesStrittholt 9
1 Geos Institute, 84-4th Street
The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) shifted federal lands management from a focus on timber production to ecosystem management and biodiversity conservation. The plan established a network of conservation reserves and an ecosystem management strategy on ~10 million hectares from northern California to Washington State, USA, within the range of...
Full Text:
., Heiken, D., Frissell, C. A., Karr, J. R., Nelson, S. K., ...
& Strittholt, J. (2015). Building on Two
There is a perceived trade-off between fire risk reduction and northern spotted owl habitat protection in dry-conifer forests in southwestern Oregon. Management options for balancing this trade-off need to be sought at the landscape level. Applied landscape ecology suggests three important features to consider are (1) patch size and configuration...
Increasingly, objectives for forests with moderate- or mixed-severity fire regimes are to restore successionally diverse landscapes that are resistant and resilient to current and future stressors. Maintaining native species and characteristic processes requires this successional diversity, but methods to achieve it are poorly explained in the literature. In the Inland...
Private forest owners face an increasing risk of economic damage from extreme wildfires as the climate becomes warmer and drier. This thesis empirically estimates the influence of climate on private forest owners’ management decisions using plot-level data in the Pacific states of the U.S. Econometric models are specified where the...
The 2002 Biscuit Fire burned through more than 200,000 ha of mixed conifer/
evergreen hardwood forests in southwestern Oregon and northwestern
California. The remarkable size of the fire and the diversity of conditions through
which it burned provided an opportunity to analyze the correlates of burn severity
across vegetation types...
This thesis explores the complexity of relationships between communities and the ecosystems in which they live through a focus on forest restoration and fuels reduction on private land. As a case study, research took place in the Klamath-Siskiyou region of rural Northern California, in Humboldt and Siskiyou counties. The research...
This report discusses major characteristics of western Oregon’s lowland rivers, streams, and estuaries that the IMST finds to be important to wild salmonids. IMST describes how landscape scale factors (landscape structure, landscape function, disturbance regimes, and landscape scale biological processes) historically supported salmonid populations in western Oregon lowlands. The report...
In response to concerns about excessive stand densities and high-severity wildfires, land
managers in the western United States are carrying out extensive programs of fuel reduction
thinning. How will these sudden reductions in canopy cover and associated changes in
habitat affect native and exotic herbaceous vegetation and canopy species regeneration?...
Landscape characteristics can strongly influence demographic and genetic processes in wildlife populations. Climate change and human land use are causing many landscapes to change rapidly, and the effects on wildlife populations must be understood to properly manage these threats and design effective conservation strategies. In this dissertation, I explored the...
Following high-severity fire, forest succession may take alternate pathways depending on the pattern of the fire and any secondary disturbances during early stand development, with lasting consequences for ecosystem function. The objectives of this research were to quantify: (1) early postfire regeneration as influenced by the spatial pattern of a...
Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been steadily increasing from anthropogenic energy production, development and use. Carbon cycling in the terrestrial biosphere, particularly forest ecosystems, has an important role in regulating atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. US West coast forest management policies are being developed to implement forest bioenergy production while...
Forest carnivores such as the fisher have frequently been the target of conservation concern due to their association with older forests and assumed sensitivity to landscape-level habitat alteration. Although the fisher has been extirpated from most of its former range in the western U.S., it is still found throughout much...
Humboldt Redwoods State Park in southern Humboldt County, California is a coastal redwood forest, a highly unique and valued ecosystem. It has many social, cultural, ecological, and economic values, including recreational benefits, heritage and aesthetic values, high biodiversity, nutrient cycling, and climate regulation. However, Humboldt County is at risk of...
My thesis is an exploration of xánthiip (Karuk for black oak, Quercus kelloggii) restoration within the Karuk Tribe’s Ancestral Territory in present-day northwestern California. Black oak is a cultural keystone species for the Karuk and has been chosen as one of the species to guide Tribally led forest restoration work...
Wildfire in dry, frequent-fire forests is a pressing issue for natural resource managers, communities and politicians in the western United States. Area affected by wildfire has climbed steadily over the last twenty years and is expected to increase in the future. Recognition of the importance of both social and biophysical...
Wildfire impacts have intensified in many ecosystems across the western United States due to the combined impact of fire exclusion, climate change, and land management practices. However, on many of these landscapes, fire is a fundamental ecological process that has shaped vegetation structural and compositional diversity, ecosystem function, landscape pattern,...
Managing wildlands to protect species and ecosystem services in response to climate change is challenging. To develop effective long-term strategies, natural resource managers need to account for the projected effects of climate change as well as the uncertainty inherent in those projections. Vegetation models are one important source of projected...
Climate Change in the Northwest: Implications for Our Landscapes, Waters, and Communities is a report aimed at assessing the state of knowledge about key climate impacts and consequences to various sectors and communities in the Northwest United States. This report draws on two recent state climate assessments in Washington in...
The use of Native American fire regimes evolved in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion over millennia. A mixture of Native American and Euro-American socio-cultural management has developed from adaptations to climate, topography, ecological processes, and land use practices. This research incorporates Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to partially examine the role of tribal...