Subsidized timber sales from national forest lands in the United States

Author(s):  
Robert Repetto
Author(s):  
Howard G. Wilshire ◽  
Richard W. Hazlett ◽  
Jane E. Nielson

Along the Colorado Plateau’s high-standing Mogollon Rim in northern Arizona’s Coconino National Forest stands a small patch of big trees that matured well before Europeans came to North America. Massive ponderosa pines, and even pinyon pines and western junipers, tower above the forest floor, shutting out all but the most shade-tolerant competitors. Few places like this one still exist anywhere in the United States, even on national forest lands. A tourist hoping to see all the diversity that earliest European arrivals found commonplace in the western landscape must seek out a wide scattering of isolated enclaves across the region. Western forests no longer contain the grand glades and lush thickets that our forerunners encountered because most woodlands, especially those owned by the public, largely serve a wide variety of human purposes, as campsites or home sites, board-feet of lumber, potential jobs, recreational playgrounds, and even temples of the spirit. We also rely on forests to maintain habitat for endangered species and seed banks for restoring depleted biodiversity—and to provide us with clean air and water, stable hillside soils, and flood control in wet years. Forests must perform these roles while being consumed, fragmented by roads, and heavily eroded. But there is no guarantee that these most beloved and iconic of natural resources can sustain such a burden. Federal, state, and local government agencies oversee and regulate western U.S. forest lands and their uses, trying to manage the complex and only partly understood biological interactions of forest ecology to serve public needs. But after nine decades of variable goals, and five decades of encroaching development, western woodlands are far from healthy. Urban pollution and exotic tree diseases, some brought by humans, are killing pines, firs, and oaks. Loggers have more than decimated the oldest mountainside forests—most valuable for habitat and lumber alike—with clearcutting practices that induce severe soil erosion. Illegal clearings for marijuana farms are increasing.


Ecosphere ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. e02637
Author(s):  
James E. Smith ◽  
Grant M. Domke ◽  
Michael C. Nichols ◽  
Brian F. Walters

Zootaxa ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 3114 (1) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
WILLIAM A. SHEAR

The new species Opiona graeningi is described from caves in the Marble Mountain Wilderness Area, Klamath National Forest, Siskiyou Co., California, as the first troglomorphic species of Opiona, the first troglobiont from the globally important Klamath Siskiyou ecoregion, and possibly the first troglobiotic caseyid. Notes are provided on the composition of the genus Opiona and on the interpretation of the gonopods. Opiona, with 13 described species, may not be monophyletic.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R Coughlan ◽  
Heidi Huber-Stearns ◽  
Courtney Schultz

Abstract Climate change presents a novel and significant threat to the sustainability of forest ecosystems worldwide. The United States Forest Service (USFS) has conducted climate change vulnerability assessments for much of the 193 million acres of national forest lands it manages, yet little to no research exists on the degree to which management units have adopted considerations of climate change into planning or project implementation. In response to this knowledge gap, we piloted a survey instrument in USFS Region 1 (Northern region) and Region 6 (Pacific Northwest region) to determine criteria for assessing the degree to which national forests integrate climate-change considerations into their management planning and activities. Our resulting climate-change adaptation index provides an efficient quantitative approach for identifying where, how, and, potentially, why some national forests are making more progress toward incorporating climate-change adaptations into forest planning and management. Study Implications We used a self-assessment survey of planners and managers on US National Forests in Forest Service Regions 1 and 6 to design a climate change adaptation index for measuring the degree to which national forests units have integrated considerations of climate change into their planning and management activities. Our resulting index can potentially be used to help understand how and why the USFS’s decentralized climate-change adaptation strategy has led some national forests to make comparatively significant progress towards adapting to climate change while others have lagged behind.


Author(s):  
Sarah M. Butler ◽  
Emily S. Huff ◽  
Stephanie A. Snyder ◽  
Brett J. Butler ◽  
Mary Tyrrell

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 1935
Author(s):  
Flavie Pelletier ◽  
Bianca N.I. Eskelson ◽  
Vicente J. Monleon ◽  
Yi-Chin Tseng

As the frequency and size of wildfires increase, accurate assessment of burn severity is essential for understanding fire effects and evaluating post-fire vegetation impacts. Remotely-sensed imagery allows for rapid assessment of burn severity, but it also needs to be field validated. Permanent forest inventory plots can provide burn severity information for the field validation of remotely-sensed burn severity metrics, although there is often a mismatch between the size and shape of the inventory plot and the resolution of the rasterized images. For this study, we used two distinct datasets: (1) ground-based inventory data from the United States national forest inventory to calculate ground-based burn severity; and (2) remotely-sensed data from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) database to calculate different remotely-sensed burn severity metrics based on six weighting scenarios. Our goals were to test which MTBS metric would best align with the burn severity of national inventory plots observed on the ground, and to identify the superior weighting scenarios to extract pixel values from a raster image in order to match burn severity of the national inventory plots. We fitted logistic and ordinal regression models to predict the ground-based burn severity from the remotely-sensed burn severity averaged from six weighting scenarios. Among the weighting scenarios, two scenarios assigned weights to pixels based on the area of a pixel that intersected any parts of a national inventory plot. Based on our analysis, 9-pixel weighted averages of the Relative differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (RdNBR) values best predicted the ground-based burn severity of national inventory plots. Finally, the pixel specific weights that we present can be used to link other Landsat-derived remote sensing metrics with United States forest inventory plots.


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