Summer crowds: An analysis of USFS campground reservations during the COVID-19 pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, US public land managers faced the challenge of catering to large increases in camping demand, while maintaining social distancing guidelines. In this paper, we use multivariate linear regression to analyze weekly changes in reservations to US Forest Service (USFS) campgrounds between 2019 and 2020. The regression models estimate the impact of local COVID infection rates, public health restrictions, and spatial spillovers from proximity to National Parks (NPs), metropolitan areas and wildfire on camping demand. Our sample includes 1,688 individual USFS campgrounds from across the contiguous US. The results illustrate the dramatic increases in camping on USFS land that occurred in the summer of 2020 and demonstrate that increases in local infection rates led to significant increases in camping nights reserved in the summer. The results also illustrate that the increase in camping nights reserved at USFS campgrounds was particularly dramatic for campgrounds located near large metropolitan areas and near NPs that saw increases in overall recreational visits. These results point to the important role that public lands played during the pandemic and can help guide public land resource allocations for campground maintenance and operation.

Computing views, remodeling environments

This article traces the development and expansion of early computer systems for analyzing views at three state-owned agencies in the United States and Great Britain: the US Forest Service, the Central Electricity Generating Board of England and Wales, and the Greater London Authority. Following the technology over four decades, from 1968 to 2012, the article traces assumptions incorporated into initial programs and propagated through to the present. These programs were designed to address questions about visual environments and proximities by numerical calculations alone, without the need for field observations. Each historical episode provides unique insights into the role of abstraction and calculation in the production of landscapes and the built environment, and shows how computer-generated view data became an important currency in planning control, not primarily for aesthetic but for financial and political reasons.

Effects of ownership patterns on cross-boundary wildfires

Understanding ownership effects on large wildfires is a precursor to the development of risk governance strategies that better protect people and property and restore fire-adapted ecosystems. We analyzed wildfire events in the Pacific Northwest from 1984 to 2018 to explore how area burned responded to ownership, asking whether particular ownerships burned disproportionately more or less, and whether these patterns varied by forest and grass/shrub vegetation types. While many individual fires showed indifference to property lines, taken as a whole, we found patterns of disproportionate burning for both forest and grass/shrub fires. We found that forest fires avoided ownerships with a concentration of highly valued resources—burning less than expected in managed US Forest Service forested lands, private non-industrial, private industrial, and state lands—suggesting the enforcement of strong fire protection policies. US Forest Service wilderness was the only ownership classification that burned more than expected which may result from the management of natural ignitions for resource objectives, its remoteness or both. Results from this study are relevant to inform perspectives on land management among public and private entities, which may share boundaries but not fire management goals, and support effective cross-boundary collaboration and shared stewardship across all-lands.

Response to the Journal of Forestry Article: “US Forest Service Implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act: Fast, Variable, Rarely Litigated, and Declining”

The Fleischman et al. (2020a) article on US Forest Service (FS) implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) correctly identified a decline in the number of NEPA analyses, but several conclusions were not supported by the data used. After analyzing their and other relevant data, we reached substantially different conclusions. Using FS budget data, we found budgets supporting NEPA analyses to be flat to increasing. Likewise, using FS accomplishment data, we found several FS land-management activities increased as others remained flat or decreased. The three types of NEPA analyses took statistically significant different times to complete, and time to complete analyses declined little over 15 years. We also found that litigation rates varied substantially by NEPA analysis type, resource purpose, and FS region. Conducting NEPA analyses is a necessary step in federal land management. However, resources invested in NEPA analyses represent an opportunity cost, and the success of the FS is better measured by on-the-ground accomplishments rather than number of NEPA analyses produced. Study Implications National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analyses are required for management of National Forest System (NFS) lands. The Forest Service (FS) devotes substantial effort to conducting NEPA analyses, and the use of NEPA analyses in litigation against NFS management activities is well documented. Land managers and the public need an accurate understanding of how the FS is implementing NEPA. A recent Journal of Forestry article about NEPA assumed that NFS budgets and land management activities declined with the number of NEPA analyses. By contrast, data from the FS shows (1) NFS budgets have been flat to increasing, (2) several NFS accomplishments have been flat to increasing, (3) the time to complete a NEPA analysis varies substantially by the type of analysis, (4) the amount of time the FS takes to complete NEPA analyses has declined very little over the past 15 years, and (5) litigation of NEPA analyses varies by the type of analysis, FS region, and resource purposes. Although conducting environmental analysis is a necessary step in federal land management, completing NEPA analyses is not a substitute for accomplishing on-the-ground management activities, and resources invested in NEPA analyses represent an opportunity cost to the FS.

The Development of an Organizational Safety Culture in the United States Forest Service

For over 100 years, the US Forest Service (USFS) has developed initiatives to improve safety outcomes. Herein we discuss the engineered solutions used from 1910 through 1994, when the agency relied on physical science to address the hazards of wildland fire suppression. We then interpret safety initiatives of the subsequent 25 years, as the USFS incorporated social science perspectives both into its understanding of emergency fire incidents and its mitigation of vulnerabilities across all fields of work. Tracing the safety programs using a historical sociology approach, we identify, within the agency’s narrative, three recent developments in its organizational safety culture: cultural awareness, cultural management, and cultural reorganization. This article describes how the development of top-down safety initiatives are questioned and shaped by employees who actively influence the trajectory of a safety culture in the USFS. Study Implications: Safety is a core value of the US Forest Service (USFS), and several safety initiatives, along with employee feedback over the years, have shaped the organizational culture of the agency. To build a robust and world-renowned safety culture in high-risk industries, managers require an understanding of the origins of their organization’s current safety culture. Using a critical social science analytical lens, we discuss how safety initiatives and the development of a safety culture position organizations such as the USFS to move away from reactionary safety initiatives and anchor to employee safety as a core value in order to absorb external shocks, such as rapidly changing ecosystems, development in the wildland urban interface, and larger and more intense wildfires.

TreeMap, a tree-level model of conterminous US forests circa 2014 produced by imputation of FIA plot data

A 30 × 30m-resolution gridded dataset of forest plot identifiers was developed for the conterminous United States (CONUS) using a random forests machine-learning imputation approach. Forest plots from the US Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis program (FIA) were imputed to gridded c2014 landscape data provided by the LANDFIRE project using topographic, biophysical, and disturbance variables. The output consisted of a raster map of plot identifiers. From the plot identifiers, users of the dataset can link to a number of tree- and plot-level attributes stored in the accompanying tables and in the publicly available FIA DataMart, and then produce maps of any of these attributes, including number of trees per acre, tree species, and forest type. Of 67,141 FIA plots available, 62,758 of these (93.5%) were utilized at least once in imputation to 2,841,601,981 forested pixels in CONUS. Continuous high-resolution forest structure data at a national scale will be invaluable for analyzing carbon dynamics, habitat distributions, and fire effects.

Quantitative Models of Fungi Interaction--based on Logistic models

As the key medium for decomposing wood fibers, fungi play a vital role in promoting the carbon cycle. The purpose of this paper is to establish mathematic models describing the process of fungi decomposing litter and wood fiber. The paper comprehensively consider the effects of temperature, moisture, location and other factors on fungal traits, and introduced the experimental data of the US Forest Service Center for Forest Mycology Research (CFMR).Based on the model of competition among populations and the modern coexistence theory, this paper establishes the competitive model between two fungi, then generalizes it to a variety of fungi and predicts the short-term and long-term effects.

A Comprehensive Forest Biomass Dataset for the USA Allows Customized Validation of Remotely Sensed Biomass Estimates

There are several new and imminent space-based sensors intended to support mapping of forest structure and biomass. These instruments, along with advancing cloud-based mapping platforms, will soon contribute to a proliferation of biomass maps. One means of differentiating the quality of different maps and estimation strategies will be comparison of results against independent field-based estimates at various scales. The Forest Inventory and Analysis Program of the US Forest Service (FIA) maintains a designed sample of uniformly measured field plots across the conterminous United States. This paper reports production of a map of statistical estimates of mean biomass, created at approximately the finest scale (64,000-hectare hexagons) allowed by FIA’s sample density. This map may be useful for assessing the accuracy of future remotely sensed biomass estimates. Equally important, fine-scale mapping of FIA estimates highlights several ways in which field- and remote sensing-based methods must be aligned to ensure comparability. For example, the biomass in standing dead trees, which may or may not be included in biomass estimates, represents a source of potential discrepancy that FIA shows to be particularly important in the Western US. Likewise, alternative allometric equations (which link measurable tree dimensions such as diameter to difficult-to-measure variables like biomass) strongly impact biomass estimates in ways that can vary over short distances. Potential mismatch in the conditions counted as forests also varies greatly over space. Field-to-map comparisons will ideally minimize these sources of uncertainty by adopting common allometry, carbon pools, and forest definitions. Our national hexagon-level benchmark estimates, provided in Supplementary Files, therefore addresses multiple pools and allometric approaches independently, while providing explicit forest area and uncertainty information. This range of information is intended to allow scientists to minimize potential discrepancies in support of unambiguous validation.

Securigera varia (crown vetch).

S. varia is a perennial herbaceous vine from the pea family that has been introduced into various countries as an ornamental, for erosion control, ground cover, soil improvement, as a cover crop and as fodder/forage for livestock (GISD, 2016, US Forest Service, 2016). The species is considered a threat in the USA, for its rapid vegetative growth resulting in monocultures and its detrimental effect on the native vegetation (Molano-Flores, 2014; Invasive Plant Atlas of the United States, 2016). The multi-branched rhizomes can extend up to 3 m long; and the stems can extend up to 2 m long; plants can fully cover 20-30 square metres in four years (Molano-Flores, 2014; US Forest Service, 2016). Luneva (2009) cites it as a dangerous weed that is a problem in rye, oat, summer and winter wheat crops and in vineyards; seeds littering the cereal grains, being hard to separate. There are no invasive behaviour reports for the species in western Europe (Alien Plants of Belgium, 2016). It is reported as invasive in many states of the USA, and in British Columbia in Canada (Molano-Flores, 2014; Casals, 2016; E-Flora of British Columbia, 2016; US Forest Service, 2016). It is included in a list of noxious plants of concern in Mexico, with the recommendation of doing a country assessment for its eradication or containment (Sánchez-Blanco et al., 2012). It is also included in the Global Invasive Species Database of the IUCN (GISD, 2016). An invasiveness assessment carried out for Alaska gave it an invasiveness rank of 68 on a scale of 1-100 (Alaska Natural Heritage Program, 2016).