Life Sciences Commons^™

Historic Fire Regimes On Eastern Great Basin (Usa) Mountains Reconstructed From Tree Rings, Stanley G. Kitchen

Theses and Dissertations

Management of natural landscapes requires knowledge of key disturbance processes and their effects. Fire and forest histories provide valuable insight into how fire and vegetation varied and interacted in the past. I constructed multi-century fire chronologies for 10 sites on six mountain ranges representative of the eastern Great Basin (USA), a region in which historic fire information was lacking. I also constructed tree recruitment chronologies for two sites. I use these chronologies to address three research foci. First, using fire-scar data from four heterogeneous sites, I assert that mean fire interval (MFI) values calculated from composite chronologies provide suitable estimates …

The Use Of Tree Rings To Date Beaver Colonies, J. Benton Kettleson

Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science

In 1946, I began the periodic observation of several beaver colonies located near my family's summer cabin, in Crow Wing Co., central Minnesota. From 1953 to 1956, a detailed study of the colonies was conducted as a Junior Academy of Science project. During this period, several new colonies were established and many of the older ones abandoned. A study of aerial photographs, followed by a ground check on foot or by canoe, turned up many other beaver colonies, some active at the time of discovery and many apparently long deserted.

In searching for a method of ascertaining when these workings …