Science You Can Use

The USDA Forest Service is required to develop "land management plans," which serve as roadmaps for maintaining the health and productivity of national forests and grasslands. These plans are designed to support ecological integrity, or an ecosystem's ability to withstand environmental disturbance. One way that national forests and grasslands, or "planning units", measure ecological integrity is by looking at the way that focal species respond to the effects of management activities and environmental changes.

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Until recently, wildlife habitat maps were static documents that can quickly become outdated anytime landscape conditions changed due to disturbances like wildfire, drought, and timber harvest. But now, researchers at the Rocky Mountain Research Station and their collaborators have developed an approach for producing near-real-time wildlife habitat maps using Google Earth Engine. These products are called Living Maps because of their ability to stay up to date - incorporating new input data and remaining accurate over time - thus functioning like an automated wildlife habitat monitoring system.

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When wildland firefighters head into the field, they know the work is dangerous; but until now, agencies lacked detailed data on exactly which activities and hazards posed the greatest threats. A recent analysis of five years of serious firefighter injuries offers new insights.

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It's no secret that wildland fires kill trees, but are more trees killed by fire when they are already stressed from drought? New research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service indicates that prefire drought can increase tree mortality after fire, even with the same level of tree damage.

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Like Goldilocks, ground-nesting birds in the southeastern U.S. need habitat conditions that are "just right." They need just the right food and just enough protective cover, all in close proximity - talk about high maintenance! Recently published research syntheses in the Fire Effects Information System (FEIS) about ground-nesting bird species of management concern describe how prescribed fire can help meet these needs for chuck-will's-widows, eastern whip-poor-wills, and northern bobwhites.

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When smoke from a prescribed fire pops up on an otherwise clear day, people may question the rationale behind the haze. After all, smoke from wildland fires can be a major health hazard due to fine particulates (PM2.5) and gaseous pollutants. At the same time, prescribed fires are one of our best tools to reduce hazardous fuels and restore fire-prone forests and grasslands. In recent years, land managers have been asked to expand the use of prescribed fire, but smoke is consistently cited as a barrier. New research by USDA Forest Service scientists sheds light on one key smoke challenge - long-term smoldering of decomposed organic matter, also known as duff.

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Healthy streams play a critical role in supporting plant, fish, and animal communities. However, stream degradation is a global problem that threatens the condition of these important ecosystems. Channel incision is one way that streams can change in response to natural or human processes. This process of degradation leads to lower water tables and a lost connection to the floodplain. As a result, water availability changes for the riparian plant communities, resulting in further degradation.

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The desert is hot, dry, and prickly … the perfect combination for wildfires. So, shouldn't desert plants be used to fire? It turns out that Sonoran desert scrub communities, home to the iconic saguaro cactus, are vulnerable to frequent large or severe wildfires and may not recover for centuries, if at all. Recent publications by Rocky Mountain Research Station ecologists discuss how desert plants respond to fires, and how big, how often, and how hot fires burn in this ecosystem. The Fire Regime Synthesis about Sonoran desert scrub communities and associated Species Reviews are published in the Fire Effects Information System (FEIS) - an online searchable database of research syntheses about how fire affects ecosystems and individual species.

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Individual fire history studies paint a picture of how often and how severely fires burned on specific landscapes, providing valuable points of evidence for land management decisions. Syntheses of multiple fire history studies weave these individual pictures into a panoramic tapestry, providing a more complete understanding of historical fire regimes. For example, syntheses of fire history studies in ponderosa pine communities tell stories about precolonial historical fires frequently burning small areas and occasionally burning large areas, followed by a century with very few fires due to fire exclusion. Fire exclusion began with European settlement, first by reducing ignitions by American Indians, then by reducing fine-fuel biomass and connectivity with livestock grazing and eventually, through active fire suppression.

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In a field that is hyper-focused on efficiency and cost savings, environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling - or detecting fish and wildlife from traces of genetic material in the environment - has become the gold standard. Over the last decade, eDNA sampling has emerged as a powerful and cost-effective tool for national forests to obtain the data they need to make management decisions. Now, Forest Service scientists have created "biochips" that generate these high-value data even more efficiently, buoying the value of eDNA monitoring capacity far into the future.

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