Science You Can Use

In early 2024, Michael Caggiano, a wildland firefighter and regional fire analyst with the Forest Service, approached David Flores, a research social scientist with the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station, with a proposal: what about conducting a research study on the perspectives of wildland firefighters around food catering?

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Hidden like fish eggs in the streambed, the answer was buried in the mathematical models of Morgan Spark's graduate work. Biologists and land managers know early fish life is sensitive, and nature is difficult to predict. In the streambed, eggs and young fish can be at risk from unintentional habitat disruptions from activities such as grazing, prescribed fire, and road work. The question was how to know when wild fish are hatching and emerging to avoid those sensitive windows. A new tool, hatchR, is here to lend biologists a helping hand - or fin.

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Hostile winds yanked at the yellow transect tapes. Stephanie Yelenik and fellow researchers plodded on, endeavoring to place tapes in an organized grid. Their field site stretched across the fire-scorched sagebrush steppe of Peavine Mountain in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest near Reno, Nevada. The team of Forest Service and University of Nevada scientists were setting up experimental plots to test native seeding strategies. Music courtesy of Souvenir Thread. Read the Science You Can Use and access the related content on Treesearch

Did you know your cellphone's GPS locations can help us decipher how recreationists and wildlife overlap in time and space? Mark Ditmer, a research ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, and colleagues harnessed this cellphone-derived human mobility data to explore how managers can enhance recreation and protect wildlife in sensitive habitats. Music courtesy of Souvenir Thread. Read the Science You Can Use and access the related content on Treesearch.

For nearly 100 years, the Forest Service has inventoried America's forest resources to provide a scorecard of forest health, vitality, and sustainability. Born out of the McSweeney-McNary Forest Research Act of 1928, the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program is nationally coordinated by regional experts and now consists of more than 355,000 survey plots across public and private land.

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For homeowners living in the wildland-urban interface, wildfire outreach programs encourage wildfire risk mitigation and evacuation preparedness as steps to protect homes and lives in the event of a wildfire. Wildfire risk mitigation may include activities such as removing vegetation from around structures and storing combustible materials (e.g. firewood or propane tanks) away from homes. Signing up to receive evacuation notifications, packing a to-go bag, or identifying evacuation routes are examples of evacuation preparedness.

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Land managers rely on best available information and relevant research for decision making, but matching the right information to the right questions can sometimes be challenging. To close this gap, when researchers and managers co-produce research from the beginning it is more likely research findings will have practical applications. Recently published work by USDA Forest Service researchers Chris Armatas, Teresa Hollingsworth, and colleagues working at the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute (ALWRI) in Missoula, Montana, reflects on both the benefits and tradeoffs of using a co-production approach for developing the ALWRI 10-year science agenda intended to help inform management of wilderness areas.

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Public lands provide extensive recreation opportunities for activities including camping and cabins, biking, horseback riding, hiking, and fishing. Due to increasing visitation and the associated impacts to natural resources and the visitor experience, recreation managers may decide to adopt a recreation allocation strategy to limit the number of visitors at a given time. Allocation includes allotment (splitting between groups such as commercial use and private use) and rationing (a mechanism for allocating within groups). The main strategies used for rationing include first come, first served, pricing, reservations, lotteries, and merit.

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When the Black Fire ignited in southwestern New Mexico in 2022, it had all the ingredients for disaster: record-high winds, extremely low humidity, and over 131,000 hectares (323,708 acres) of forest fuels to feed on. But something unexpected happened. Instead of becoming another catastrophic megafire, it burned mostly at low to moderate severity. The secret? The landscape had already experienced dozens of previous fires, both planned and natural, that helped tame the beast.

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To effectively manage fire, land and fire managers need detailed, current local information - for example, the amount of burnable material present, fuel moisture levels, winds, temperatures, and terrain changes across time and space. Managers also need these data to decide where, when, and how to treat a landscape while balancing costs and benefits, projected wildfire risk, and potential impacts.

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