As a result of a warming climate, subsequent declining snowpack, and a century of fire suppression, forest fires are increasing across the western United States. However, we still do not fully understand how forest fire effects snowpack energy balance, nor the volume and availability of snow melt and associated water...
Throughout many of the world’s mountain ranges snowpack accumulates during the winter and into the spring, providing a natural reservoir for water. As this reservoir melts, it fills streams and recharges groundwater for over 1 billion people globally. Despite its importance to water resources, our understanding of the storage capacity...
Shallow, rapid soil mass movements are common events and primary sources
of sediment in steep terrain of the Pacific Northwest.
Poorly vegetated debris deposits and scars resulting from landslides
remove land from the productive timber base, and are subject to
continuing erosion. To examine the impact of these events on...
The volcanic (~45-10 Ma) and plutonic rocks (~37-12 Ma) comprising the Western Cascades extend from northernmost California to southern British Columbia and are ancestral to modern arc magmatism. The ancestral arc hosts a series of small plutons that are locally associated with porphyry (Cu-Mo) and epithermal (Au) ore deposits. Three...
Pseudotsuga menziesii dominates the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
But though it is dominat, Tsuaa heteroohylla or Abies amabilis
is usually climax. Many researchers have studied Pseudotsuga on the
widespread mesic sites where it is seral, but few have examined the
relatively rare ecosystems in which Pseudotsuga or its associate...
Despite the recognized role of soil arthropod fauna on nutrient cycling
and decomposition processes, many aspects of the effects of sylvicultural
methods in forest ecosystems upon their biology remain poorly understood.
The long term effects of prescribed fires on soil arthropods in forest
ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest have never...