Research Highlights

Accurate estimates of the carbon moving in and out of forests, known as carbon flux, are critical for managers and policymakers tasked with meeting carbon accounting goals.

Forest managers face the challenge of integrating fuels management with other management objectives across land ownerships.

Past forest management strategies often relied on clear-cut timber harvests that were replanted with single tree species.

Wildfires are a regular occurrence for many western forests, but increases in the size and severity of recent wildfires have led to concerns about long-term forest recovery. It can take decades to centuries for forests to fully recover from a severe fire, but most studies focus on short-term regeneration outcomes.

Timing is everything, especially when it comes to the complex ecological interactions between plants and the environment. For range managers concerned with maintaining the integrity and productivity of rangelands, it is critical to monitor the seasonal development and condition of grasses and other vegetation on which cattle graze.

Threatened coho salmon require different types of freshwater habitat depending on life stage. Connectivity among these different habitats may have more influence on long-term population health than the quality of individual habitats alone. 

Greater sage-grouse are a conservation bellwether of sagebrush, one of the most threatened ecosystems of North America. Management actions for "umbrella" species like sage-grouse can also benefit co-occurring species because of overlapping ranges and similar habitat associations. Reptiles are of particular interest because of their high diversity in shrublands and grasslands where sage-grouse live. 

Managers rely on models of wildland fire to make critical decisions about fuels management, but existing models can be limited by simplistic data inputs that do not reflect the true complexity of wildland fuels. The U.S. USDA Forest Service, University of Washington, and Tall Timbers Research Station are collaborating to develop new 3D fuels data that can be used in next-generation fire and smoke models to support wildland fire and fuels management.

A beta version of the SoCal EcoServe tool will soon be available for the Los Padres, San Bernardino, Cleveland, and Angeles National Forests to help assess effects of 2020 wildfires and prepare postfire Natural Resource Damage Assessments. This tool provides a repeatable and transparent framework for quantifying the change in ecosystem services and their values associated with damage to natural resources on national forest lands.

Lee Cerveny and Monika Derrien, research social scientists with the Pacific Northwest Research Station, examined how outdoor programs for veterans on public lands can use the inherent therapeutic value of nature to benefit veterans, particularly those experiencing posttraumatic stress. They identified the challenges and opportunities facing outdoor programs for veterans on public lands, highlighting how agency policies may shape the development of therapeutic landscapes.

State-of-the-art, lidar-based remote sensing technologies are high-precision tools that are being used to support cost-effective carbon monitoring systems around the world. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest Research Station and their colleagues developed an efficient sampling design and measurement protocol that can be used in combination with remote sensing data sources to estimate and model forest biomass and carbon at multiple scales. This method supports more accurate carbon monitoring in programs worldwide.

Degraded air quality due to smoke from wildland fires may exacerbate the respiratory effects of COVID-19, potentially increasing infection rates and worsening infection outcomes. To mitigate the health impacts from the confluence of smoke and COVID-19, researchers from the Pacific Northwest Research Station and their colleagues created a national Smoke-COVID dashboard to help agency personnel make decisions in situations where both smoke and COVID-19 are factors.

Wildfire smoke is the predominant cause of major air quality events in the United States that affect millions of Americans each year, causing significant negative health effects. To enhance the current air quality monitoring system across the country, researchers from the USDA Forest Service and the Environmental Protection Agencysupplemented existing monitoring systems with data from low-cost sensors, dramatically expanding the spatial coverage of air quality monitoring systems theUnited States. This air quality information is now publicly available for the first time in a map at AirNow.gov.

Climate change has caused “shrubification,” or increased shrub cover and size, across arctic and boreal ecosystems. Shrubification can have broad impacts on the ecosystem, so consistent information about the spatial variability and structure of shrub vegetation is needed to support managers and decisionmakers. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest Research Station and their colleagues have developed a new method to consistently and efficiently assess shrub cover on montane and subalpine regions from airborne imagery

Large swaths of dead trees across a landscape pose an extreme fire hazard, as seen in the southern Sierra Nevada range of California. Researchers developed a method that uses remote sensing and spectral sensing to pre-emptively identify drought-stressed trees. Forest managers can use this advance notice to prioritize management actions to lessen the risk of wide-spread tree mortality.

Scientists find a safer, less costly, and noninvasive method for monitoring northern spotted owl. Strategically placed recording units detected calls of northern spotted owls and barred owls over a range of forest conditions. These findings are being used to design and inform the transition from mark-recapture to passive bioacoustics as the primary monitoring method for northern spotted owl populations under the Northwest Forest Plan effectiveness monitoring program.

Landscape-scale management to reduce wildfire risk in frequent-fire forest ecosystems of the western United States calls for coordination and buy-in from many diverse landowners. Researcher social scientist Susan Charnley with the Pacific Northwest Research Station and her colleagues examined multiple “all lands” projects for fuels reduction and management in Oregon and California to identify the most important principles and tools that promote collective action for wildfire risk reduction. This information acts as a framework supporting policymakers and land managers working to reduce wildfire risk across multi-ownership landscapes.  

A special issue in the journal Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, included the latest research by USDA Forest Service scientists and their partners to estimate the value of carbon storage capacity of U.S. forests and projected the future impacts of USDA policies intended to enhance ecosystem services. Research forester Jeff Kline of the Pacific Northwest Research Station co-edited the issue, which included collaborative research from U.S. USDA Forest Service scientists at multiple stations, the USDA Economic Research Service, and university partners, as presented at a USDA-sponsored workshop on the valuation of ecosystem services. This information is relevant for policymakers tasked with maintaining forest ecosystem services.

The western Oregon stream FLOW PERmanence (FLOwPER) projectis using the latest technology to more accurately characterize headwater streams in western Oregon as seasonal or year-round flows. The presence of year-round water determines the size of riparian buffers that are required by the Northwest Forest Plan, the Oregon Forest Practices Act, and best management practices. This project will help reduce the cost of pre-project planning and monitoring associated with forest management activities.

Forest managers facing a range of management alternatives must choose those that achieve balance among fuels management and other goals. Supporting their efforts, researchers from the Pacific Northwest Research Station and their colleagues simulated multipurpose silvicultural treatments containing fuel reduction components to evaluate their effectiveness at improving fire resistance and found that most mechanical fuel treatments in dry mixed conifer forests achieved enhanced resistance to crown fire with varying duration. These findings identified several approaches that can limit or promote fire resistance to support forest managers in balancing multiple objectives across the landscape.