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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Interactions Among Fuel Management, Species Composition, Bark Beetles, And Climate Change And The Potential Effects On Forests Of The Lake Tahoe Basin, Robert M. Scheller, Alec M. Kretchun, E. Louise Loudermilk, Matthew D. Hurteau, Peter J. Weisberg, Carl Skinner
Interactions Among Fuel Management, Species Composition, Bark Beetles, And Climate Change And The Potential Effects On Forests Of The Lake Tahoe Basin, Robert M. Scheller, Alec M. Kretchun, E. Louise Loudermilk, Matthew D. Hurteau, Peter J. Weisberg, Carl Skinner
Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations
Climate-driven increases in wildfires, drought conditions, and insect outbreaks are critical threats to forest carbon stores. In particular, bark beetles are important disturbance agents although their long-term interactions with future climate change are poorly understood. Droughts and the associated moisture deficit contribute to the onset of bark beetle outbreaks although outbreak extent and severity is dependent upon the density of host trees, wildfire, and forest management. Our objective was to estimate the effects of climate change and bark beetle outbreaks on ecosystem carbon dynamics over the next century in a western US forest. Specifically, we hypothesized that (a) bark beetle …
Forest Understory Trees Can Be Segmented Accurately Within Sufficiently Dense Airborne Laser Scanning Point Clouds, Hamid Hamraz, Marco A. Contreras, Jun Zhang
Forest Understory Trees Can Be Segmented Accurately Within Sufficiently Dense Airborne Laser Scanning Point Clouds, Hamid Hamraz, Marco A. Contreras, Jun Zhang
Computer Science Faculty Publications
Airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) point clouds over large forested areas can be processed to segment individual trees and subsequently extract tree-level information. Existing segmentation procedures typically detect more than 90% of overstory trees, yet they barely detect 60% of understory trees because of the occlusion effect of higher canopy layers. Although understory trees provide limited financial value, they are an essential component of ecosystem functioning by offering habitat for numerous wildlife species and influencing stand development. Here we model the occlusion effect in terms of point density. We estimate the fractions of points representing different canopy layers (one overstory and …
Developing A Representative Snow-Monitoring Network In A Forested Mountain Watershed, Kelly E. Gleason, Anne Nolin, Travis R. Roth
Developing A Representative Snow-Monitoring Network In A Forested Mountain Watershed, Kelly E. Gleason, Anne Nolin, Travis R. Roth
Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations
A challenge in establishing new ground-based stations for monitoring snowpack accumulation and ablation is to locate the sites in areas that represent the key processes affecting snow accumulation and ablation. This is especially challenging in forested montane watersheds where the combined effects of terrain, climate, and land cover affect seasonal snowpack. We present a coupled modeling approach used to objectively identify representative snow-monitoring locations in a forested watershed in the western Oregon Cascades mountain range. We used a binary regression tree (BRT) non-parametric statistical model to classify peak snow water equivalent (SWE) based on physiographic landscape characteristics in an average …