Quantifying Forest Visibility with Spatial Data

We use spatial data representing transportation networks, elevation, stand height, and recreation use to construct and compare models of recreation use patterns and visibility in a forest. The recreation use pattern model depicts use frequencies along travel corridors. The visibility model quantifies visibility for all forest areas. We find that the models provide different but complementary types of information. Forest managers who are involved in scheduling harvest operations and want to address the visual concerns of forest visitors may benefit most from the visibility model. Managers who wish to know more about travel patterns or to reroute forest visitors affected by operations may benefit from the use pattern model. A combination of the two models has the highest potential for providing planning assistance in multiple-use forests. Both models may be able to enhance visual resource management (VRM) systems already in use by providing spatially explicit recreation use and visibility data.     

Earthquake Planning for Government Continuity

/ The problem of assuring government operational continuity following earthquakes has been given little research attention. Recent earthquake experience has documented that government organizations without a public safety mission do incur damaged facilities and routinely see increases in public demands following an earthquake. Impediments to service delivery associated with such dam-ages can be minimized if agencies address earthquake plan elements likely to enhance postimpact functioning, including: the potential to relocate operations, protection for the workplace, possession of an organizational inventory, emergency instructions for employees, the ability to use volunteers, and communication capacity. Factors associated with the adoption of these plan elements were studied in one county government and its municipal county seat in the southwestern United States. A census of departments within these jurisdictions was asked to complete a questionnaire reporting the level of planning activity relative to each of these plan elements. It was found that the overall level of preparedness was low, but statistically significantly related to agency size, perceived risk, and information seeking. The implications of these findings underscore the potential for disruption to government service delivery and permit the identification of potential avenues for increasing levels of preparedness.KEY WORDS: Emergency planning; Earthquakes; Government preparedness     

Forest Stand Dynamics and Livestock Grazing in Historical Context

Abstract:  Livestock grazing has been implicated as a cause of the unhealthy condition of ponderosa pine forest stands in the western United States. An evaluation of livestock grazing impacts on natural resources requires an understanding of the context in which grazing occurred. Context should include timing of grazing, duration of grazing, intensity of grazing, and species of grazing animal. Historical context, when and under what circumstances grazing occurred, is also an important consideration. Many of the dense ponderosa pine forests and less-than-desirable forest health conditions of today originated in the early 1900s. Contributing to that condition was a convergence of fire, climate, and grazing factors that were unique to that time. During that time period, substantially fewer low-intensity ground fires (those that thinned dense stands of younger trees) were the result of reduced fine fuels (grazing), a substantial reduction in fires initiated by Native Americans, and effective fire-suppression programs. Especially favorable climate years for tree reproduction occurred during the early 1900s. Exceptionally heavy, unregulated, unmanaged grazing by very large numbers of horses, cattle, and sheep during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occurred in most of the U.S. West and beginning earlier in portions of the Southwest. Today, livestock numbers on public lands are substantially lower than they were during this time and grazing is generally managed. Grazing then and grazing now are not the same.     

Germination and Establishment of the Native Plains Cottonwood (Populus deltoides Marshall subsp. monilifera) and the Exotic Russian-olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia L.)

Russian-olive ( Elaeagnus angustifolia ) is a small Eurasian tree that has escaped from cultivation and become naturalized, primarily along watercourses throughout the western United States. We examined germination and establishment of Russian-olive and plains cottonwood ( Populus deltoides ), the principal native riparian tree of the Great Plains, under a range of experimental moisture and light conditions. The fewest seedlings established under the driest conditions; seedling biomass was predictably lower in the shade; root-to-shoot ratios were higher for cottonwood, higher in the sun, and higher under drier conditions. Several interactions were also significant. The timing of germination and mortality varied between plains cottonwood and Russian-olive: cottonwood germinated in mid-June in all treatments in a single pulse with subsequent mortality; the timing and amount of Russian-olive germination differed substantially across treatments with little net mortality. Differences in life-history traits of these species, including seed size, viability, and dispersal, help explain treatment differences. Russian-olive will likely remain an important component of riparian communities along both unregulated and regulated western rivers because it succeeds under conditions optimal for cottonwood establishment and under many conditions unfavorable for cottonwood. Furthermore, many western states still encourage planting of Russian-olive, and control techniques tend to be labor-intensive and expensive.     

Reproductive Success of Captive-Bred Steelhead Trout in the Wild: Evaluation of Three Hatchery Programs in the Hood River

Abstract:  Population supplementation programs that release captive-bred offspring into the wild to boost the size of endangered populations are now in place for many species. The use of hatcheries for supplementing salmonid populations has become particularly popular. Nevertheless, whether such programs actually increase the size of wild populations remains unclear, and predictions that supplementation fish drag down the fitness of wild fish remain untested. To address these issues, we performed DNA-based parentage analyses on almost complete samples of anadromous steelhead ( Oncorhynchus mykiss ) in the Hood River in Oregon (U.S.A.). Steelhead from a supplementation hatchery (reared in a supplementation hatchery and then allowed to spawn naturally in the wild) had reproductive success indistinguishable from that of wild fish. In contrast, fish from a traditional hatchery (nonlocal origin, multiple generations in hatcheries) breeding in the same river showed significantly lower fitness than wild fish. In addition, crosses between wild fish and supplementation fish were as reproductively successful as those between wild parents. Thus, there was no sign that supplementation fish drag down the fitness of wild fish by breeding with them for a single generation. On the other hand, crosses between hatchery fish of either type (traditional or supplementation) were less fit than expected, suggesting a possible interaction effect. These are the first data to show that a supplementation program with native brood stock can provide a single-generation boost to the size of a natural steelhead population without obvious short-term fitness costs. The long-term effects of population supplementation remain untested.