Research and Publications
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The global demand for restoration has increased orders of magnitude in the last decade, and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of native seed are required to feed this restoration engine. But where are all the seeds required by restoration going to come from? Wild seed resources continue to be depleted by habitat loss, land degradation and climatic change, and over-collection of seed from wild populations threatens to erode these resources further. Ethical seed sourcing for restoration now represents a core issue in responsible restoration practice. Solutions include the introduction of regulatory frameworks controlling seed sourcing from wild populations, the development of seed farming capacity and advancement of seed enhancement technologies and precision delivery systems reducing seed wastage.
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The Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service’s “Eastside Restoration Strategy” aimed to improve forest health conditions by accelerating the pace and scale of restoration on national forests in eastern Oregon and Washington. As part of this effort, the Regional Office created a dedicated interdisciplinary Blue Mountains Restoration Strategy Team (ID Team) to conduct landscape-level planning across four national forests and innovate strategies to more effectively reach planning decisions. We conducted interviews with 25 key informants, observed meetings, analyzed documents, and worked with an advisory group to understand transferrable insights from the project.
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The WUI is often synonymous with fire risk to buildings, but this research suggests that this is not the case in all fire-prone states. While fire outreach was often present near areas where buildings are destroyed by wildfire, many communities are established after major fires.
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These results highlight a high sensitivity of statistical projections to changing threshold relationships and data uncertainty, implying that projections of future ecosystem change in threshold‐governed ecosystems will be accompanied by notable uncertainty. This work also suggests that ecological responses to climate change will exhibit high spatio‐temporal variability as different regions approach and surpass climatic thresholds over the 21st century.
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This study found that more than 20 years were required for adaptive differences to emerge among 13 populations of Wyoming big sagebrush grown in common gardens.
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Discussions of successes, struggles, and failures with partner-specific tools are vital to the successful implementation of “translational ecology” a formal term for biological conservation partnerships.
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Collaborative forest management efforts often encounter challenges related to process and stakeholder relationships. To address these challenges, groups may employ the services of coordinators and facilitators who perform a range of tasks in support of the collaborative. We sought to understand differences between facilitation and coordination in terms of trust creation and maintenance. We conducted case studies in four collaborative groups, one with a facilitator and three with coordinators. We highlight the trust-building practices unique to the facilitator and discuss the potential implications for future collaborative groups.
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This document was prepared to help scientists and the public, both of whom may not be familiar with bee taxonomy, learn how to practically identify bees in sagebrush steppe and shrubland habitats in southwest Idaho. We provide information to identify bees to the level of family and genus. A tentative list of the bee genera captured at sites used for insect community studies is included.
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Ephemeral snowpacks, or those that persist for < 60 continuous days, are challenging to observe and model because snow accumulation and ablation occur during the same season. This has left ephemeral snow understudied, despite its widespread extent. Using 328 site years from the Great Basin, we show that ephemeral snowmelt causes a 70-days-earlier soil moisture response than seasonal snowmelt. In addition, deep soil moisture response was more variable in areas with seasonal snowmelt. To understand Great Basin snow distribution, we used MODIS and Snow Data Assimilation System (SNODAS) data to map snow extent. Estimates of maximum continuous snow cover duration from SNODAS consistently overestimated MODIS observations by >25 days in the lowest (<1500 m) and highest (>2500 m) elevations. During this time period snowpack was highly variable. The maximum seasonal snow cover during water years 2005–2014 was 64 % in 2010 and at a minimum of 24 % in 2014. We found that elevation had a strong control on snow ephemerality, and nearly all snowpacks over 2500 m were seasonal except those on south-facing slopes. Additionally, we used SNODAS-derived estimates of solid and liquid precipitation, melt, sublimation, and blowing snow sublimation to define snow ephemerality mechanisms. In warm years, the Great Basin shifts to ephemerally dominant as the rain–snow transition increases in elevation. Given that snow ephemerality is expected to increase as a consequence of climate change, physics-based modeling is needed that can account for the complex energetics of shallow snowpacks in complex terrain. These modeling efforts will need to be supported by field observations of mass and energy and linked to finer remote sensing snow products in order to track ephemeral snow dynamics.
Here, we ask how mean climate and climate variation at individual sites and across a species’ range affect the specialist-generalist spectrum of germination strategies exhibited by 10 arid land forbs. We investigated these relationships using climate data for the western United States, occurrence records from herbaria, and germination trials with field-collected seeds, and predicted that generalist strategies would be most common in species that experience a high degree of climate variation or occur over a wide range of conditions. We used two metrics to describe variation in germination strategies: (a) selectivity (did seeds require specific cues to germinate?) and (b) population-level variation (did populations differ in their responses to germination cues?) in germination displayed by each species. Species exhibited distinct germination strategies, with some species demonstrating as much among-population variation as we observed among species. Modeling efforts suggested that generalist strategies evolve in response to higher spatial variation in actual evapotranspiration at a local scale and in available water in the spring and annual precipitation at a range-wide scale. Describing the conditions that lead to variation in early life-history traits is important for understanding the evolution of diversity in natural systems, as well as the possible responses of individual species to global climate change.