Reference ecological conditions offer important context for land managers as they assess the condition of their landscapes and provide benchmarks for desired future conditions. State-and-transition simulation models (STSMs) are commonly used to estimate reference conditions that can be used to evaluate current ecosystem conditions and to guide land management decisions and activities.

Premise of the Study: Leaf area is a key trait that links plant form, function, and environment. Measures of leaf area can be biased because leaf area is often estimated from dried or fossilized specimens that have shrunk by an unknown amount. We tested the common assumption that this shrinkage is negligible.

Coordinated approaches to wildfire risk mitigation strategies that cross-ownership and management boundaries are found in many policies and programs worldwide.

Dendroecology is the science that dates tree rings to their exact calendar year of formation to study processes that influence forest ecology (e.g., Speer 2010 [1], Amoroso et al., 2017 [2]). Reconstruction of past fire regimes is a core application of dendroecology, linking fire history to population dynamics and climate effects on tree growth and survivorship.

The implementation of US federal forest restoration programs on national forests is a complex process that requires balancing diverse socioecological goals with project economics.

While the use of timber harvests is generally accepted as an effective approach to controlling bark beetles during outbreaks, in reality there has been a dearth of monitoring to assess outcomes, and failures are often not reported.

This paper compares carbon (C) and nutrient contents in soils (Alfisols derived from andesite), forest floor and vegetation in a former fire (1960) and an adjacent forest in the Sagehen Watershed in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.

In 2002, the Biscuit Wildfire burned a portion of the previously established, replicated conifer unthinned and thinned experimental units of the Siskiyou Long-Term Ecosystem Productivity (LTEP) experiment, southwest Oregon. Charcoal C in pre and post-fire O horizon and mineral soil was quantified by physical separation and a peroxide-acid digestion method.

The risk of bark beetle outbreaks is widely predicted to increase because of a warming climate that accelerates temperature-driven beetle population growth and drought stress that impairs host tree defenses.

Fire is one of the most important natural disturbance processes in the western United States and ecosystems differ markedly with respect to their ecological and evolutionary relationships with fire.