Natural Resources and Conservation Commons^™

Effects Of Fuels Treatments And Wildfire On Understory Species And Fuels In The Ponderosa Pine Zone Of The Colorado Front Range, Paula Fornwalt, Merrill Kaufmann

Joint Fire Science Program Research Project Reports

The first clear indication that unnaturally dense forest conditions existed in ponderosa pine – Douglas-fir forests of the Colorado Front Range was the Buffalo Creek Fire, a large, catastrophic wildfire that burned in 1996. Ongoing research in the Front Range indicated that the Buffalo Creek Fire likely would have burned very differently under pre-settlement forest conditions; early photographs and written descriptions, as well as fire history and stand reconstruction data, all suggested that historically these forests were characterized by a matrix of low-density forests and shrubland or grassland openings that was created and maintained by a mixed-severity fire regime. As …

Effects Of Mechanically Generated Slash Particle Size On Prescribed Fire Behavior And Subsequent Vegetation Effects, Richy J. Harrod, David W. Peterson, Roger Ottmar, Peter Ohlson, Brad Flatten, Arlo Vanderwoude

Joint Fire Science Program Research Project Reports

Forest managers have begun to restore ecosystem structure and function in fire-prone ecosystems that have experienced fire exclusion, commodity based resource extraction, and extensive grazing during much of the 20th century. Mechanical thinning and prescribed burning are the primary tools for thinning dense stands and restoring pre-settlement forest structure, reducing the likelihood of devastating crown fires. Mechanical thinning can be costly when trees are nonmerchantable and prescribed burning can be risky unless fuel loadings are first reduced. Furthermore, stands that remain dense after commercial thinning can produce undesirable wildland fire- or even prescribed fire- effects on vegetation and soils. Land …

Expansion Of The Southern Variant Of The Fire And Fuels Extension For The Forest Vegetation Simulator, S. M. Zedaker, S. A. Rebain, P. J. Radtke

Joint Fire Science Program Research Project Reports

This project specifically addressed AFP 2006-3, Task 3, by providing guidance for maintaining effective fire and non-fire fuels treatments, with the aim of supporting long-term fuels management. The overall goals of the project were to parameterize, expand, and improve the Southern Variant of the Fire and Fuels Extension (FFE) to the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) with the best data currently available, to identify data weaknesses and gaps that may require additional research to reduce the uncertainty of Southern FFE model predictions, and to determine a validation framework for the Southern FFE. A wide variety of fire and fuels data and …

Evaluating The Efficacy And Ecological Impacts Of Baer Slope Stabilization Treatments On The Pot Peak/Deep Harbor Wildfire Complex, David W. Peterson, Richy J. Harrod, Terry Lillybridge, Mel Bennett

Joint Fire Science Program Research Project Reports

Post-fire slope stabilization treatments are often prescribed for severely burned areas of a wildfire, through burned area emergency response (BAER), to reduce erosion, maintain soil productivity, protect water quality, and reduce risks to human life and property. Prescribed slope stabilization treatments can include seeding of cereal grains or grasses, fertilization, mulching, and installation of physical barriers across slope contours (e.g., contour-felled logs and straw wattles). Seeding and fertilization treatments have been proposed following several high severity wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. These treatments are designed to reduce erosion by supplementing native vegetation recovery with additional populations of fast-growing species (seeding) …

Evaluation Of Science Delivery Of Joint Fire Science Program Research, David Seesholtz

Joint Fire Science Program Research Project Reports

Since its inception in 1998, the Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) has funded over 400 projects. The Joint Fire Science Program has long recognized that the investments made in wildland fire science need to be accompanied by an emphasis on science interpretation and delivery. Program success is ultimately measured by how well information from research efforts is being conveyed to resource managers and end users, and whether this information is improving management decisions. This study reviewed a sample of environmental documents from three JFSP sponsoring agencies to determine to what extent JFSP research is being incorporated into local planning efforts …

Rationale For A Permanent Seismic Network In The U.S. Central Plains Utilizing U.S. Array, Stephen S. Gao, Tina M. Niemi, Ross A. Black, Kelly H. Liu, Raymond R. Anderson, Robert M. Joeckel, Robert W. Busby, John Taber

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Droughtscape, Winter 2008, Kelly Smith

DroughtScape: Quarterly Newsletter of the National Drought Mitigation Center (2007–2023)

Now Up & On-Line:

Winter 2008 Outlook and Oct.-Dec. ’07 Summary

NDMC Experts Serve as Resource for Media

Drought Hits Ag and Urban Interests in 2007

Climatological Summary of Drought in 2007

NDMC Welcomes Data Miner Bo Zhang

New Grant Awards

Use Of Passive Integrated Transponders In Hatchling Texas Horned Lizards, Scott E. Henke

The Prairie Naturalist

The Texas horned lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum) is a Texas state-threatened species and acquisition of data related to the species' ecology is essential. To accomplish this task individual animals need to be marked. Many marking techniques are available for lizards, however the majority of techniques have been tested on adults only. Studies involving hatchling and juvenile horned lizards are scarce due to problems associated with marking and relocating individuals in these age classes. I demonstrated that injection of passive integrated transponders (PIT's) can safely be used as a marking method in young Texas horned lizards. Thirty-two captive bred hatchling lizards were …

Mortality Of An American Marten From An Off-Highway Vehicle, Joshua B. Smith, Jonathan A. Jenks

The Prairie Naturalist

While there are several reviews of the effects of OHVs and recreational activity on wildlife populations (Knight and Gutzwiller 1995, Joslin and Youmans 1999), most studies have focused on physiological (Creel et al. 2002) or behavioral (Van Dyke et al. 1986, Riley et al. 2003) responses to disturbance; none have addressed the potential for direct mortality. In 2005, we documented the death from an OHV of a juvenile, female American marten (F299) that had been radiocollared during a study documenting the distribution and abundance of American marten in the Black Hills, South Dakota (Smith 2007); the Institutional Animal Care and …

Meso-Scale Weather And Climate Observations In Kentucky For Societal Benefit, Rezaul Mahmood

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Sex-Specific Feeding Rates And Provisioning Of Fruit To Nestling Bell's Vireo, Greg H. Farley

The Prairie Naturalist

Provisioning of fruit to nestlings and possible sex-specific differences in feeding rate have not been reported for Bell's vireo (Vireo bellii; Brown 1993). While studying nesting ecology of Bell's vireo on Konza Prairie Biological Station, Geary and Riley counties, Kansas, I quantified feeding rate by sex and food type delivered to nestlings. Sex was determined by capturing adults with mist-nets and inspecting for a cloacal protuberance, as well as conducting behavioral observations of uniquely-marked individuals. Males sing regularly while moving around territories, as well as during incubation (Nolan 1960). I assigned "female" to the individual in these socially …

A Coupled Mm5-Noah And Surface Model-Based Assessment Of Sensitivity Of Planetary Boundary Layer Variables To Anomalous Soil Moisture Conditions, Rezaul Mahmood

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Equilibrium Sampling Used To Monitor Malodors In A Swine Waste Lagoon, Rezaul Mahmood

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Geologic Map Of The O'Neill 1º X 2º Quadrangle, Nebraska, With Configuration Maps Of Surfaces Of Formations, Robert Diffendal, Jr., Michael R. Voorhies, E. Jane Voorhies, H. E. Lagarry, C. L. Timperley, M. E. Perkins

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

SCALE 1:250,000

CONTOUR INTERVAL 200 FEET

Geology mapped principally from 1991-2000 by RFD, M.RV, E.JV, H. LG , and C.LT

Editing and layout by R.F. Diffendal, Jr. and D. Ebbeka

Map production by J. Nothwehr and L. Howard

Revised slightly 6 January 2009, 20 July 2010, 5 October 2010, 10 September 2012.

Chinese Liver Flukes In Latrine Sediments From Wong Nim’S Property, San Bernardino, California: Archaeoparasitology Of The Caltrans District Headquarters (Galley Proofs), Karl J. Reinhard, Adauto Araújo, Luciana Sianto, Julia G. Costello, Karen Swope

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Parasitological analysis of 5 sediment samples from latrine deposits spanning the time period from about 1880 to the 1930s are presented. Two sediment samples are from a latrine used by European-Americans. Three sediment samples are from latrines used by Chinese-Americans on the property of Wong Nim, an important member of the Chinese community. Two of the Chinese latrines were positive for human parasites. The human parasites encountered include the human whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), the giant intestinal roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides, c.f.), and the Chinese liver fluke (Clonorchis sinensis). Evidence of the liver fluke is especially …

Power Laws, Discontinuities And Regional City Size Distributions, Ahjond S. Garmestan, Craig R. Allen, Colin M. Gallagher

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Urban systems are manifestations of human adaptation to the natural environment. City size distributions are the expression of hierarchical processes acting upon urban systems. In this paper, we test the entire city size distributions for the southeastern and southwestern United States (1990), as well as the size classes in these regions for power law behavior. We interpret the differences in the size of the regional city size distributions as the manifestation of variable growth dynamics dependent upon city size. Size classics in the city size distributions are snapshots of stable states within urban systems in flux.

Unresolved Issues With The Assessment Of Multidecadal Global Land Surface Temperature Trends, Roger A. Pielke Sr., Christopher A. Davey, Dev Niyogi, Souleymane Fall, Jesse Steinweg-Woods, Ken Hubbard, Xiaomao Lin, Ming Cai, Young-Kwon Lim, Hong Li, John Nielsen-Gammon, Kevin Gallo, Robert Hale, Rezaul Mahmood, Stuart Foster, Richard T. Mcnider, Peter Blanken

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

This paper documents various unresolved issues in using surface temperature trends as a metric for assessing global and regional climate change. A series of examples ranging from errors caused by temperature measurements at a monitoring station to the undocumented biases in the regionally and globally averaged time series are provided. The issues are poorly understood or documented and relate to micrometeorological impacts due to warm bias in nighttime minimum temperatures, poor siting of the instrumentation, effect of winds as well as surface atmospheric water vapor content on temperature trends, the quantification of uncertainties in the homogenization of surface temperature data, …

Reinterpreting The Pollen Data From Dos Cabezas, Karl J. Reinhard, Vaughn M. Bryant, Sheila D. Vinton

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

The published pollen analysis of the Dos Cabezas giants, Geyer et al. (2003), lists variety of purported dietary pollen types. The paper also hypothesises that the giants were poisoned with plant toxins. We have severe reservations about the pollen evidence of diet and poisoning. We suggest that the analysts made several errors in their interpretation. Firstly, some of the discovered pollen types are not prehistoric endemics to the Dos Cabezas region of coastal Peru. These include the pollen of fava beans (cultivated in the Old World), and specified species of agave and sage. We believe that some or all of …

If Larvae Were Smart: A Simple Model For Optimal Settlement Behavior Of Competent Larvae, Robert J. Toonen, Andrew J. Tyre

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Much research has been done on larval settlement cues. Rather than having simple fixed responses to constant environmental stimuli, it seems likely that settlement decisions made by individual larvae should vary depending on the individual and the conditions under which it encounters that cue. Here, we present a simple stochastic dynamic programming model that explores the conditions under which larvae may maximize their lifetime fitness by accepting lower quality habitat rather than continuing to search for superior habitat. Our model predicts that there is a relatively narrow range of parameter values over which larval selectivity among habitat types changes dramatically …

Interactions Across Spatial Scales Among Forest Dieback, Fire, And Erosion In Northern New Mexico Landscapes, Craig D. Allen

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Ecosystem patterns and disturbance processes at one spatial scale often interact with processes at another scale, and the result of such cross-scale interactions can be nonlinear dynamics with thresholds. Examples of cross-scale pattern-process relationships and interactions among forest dieback, fire, and erosion are illustrated from northern New Mexico (USA) landscapes, where long-term studies have recently documented all of these disturbance processes. For example, environmental stress, operating on individual trees, can cause tree death that is amplified by insect mortality agents to propagate to patch and then landscape or even regional-scale forest dieback. Severe drought and unusual warmth in the southwestern …

Droughtscape, Fall 2007, National Drought Mitigation Center

DroughtScape: Quarterly Newsletter of the National Drought Mitigation Center (2007–2023)

Fall 2007 Outlook

Diverse Impacts Reported in Summer of 2007

Decadal Climate Cycles Hold Predictive Potential

Drought Experts Take Roadmap to Congress

NDMC Research Updates

Ground Water Dependence Of Endangered Ecosystems: Nebraska’S Eastern Saline Wetlands, F. Edwin Harvey, Jerry F. Ayers, David C. Gosselin

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Many endangered or threatened ecosystems depend on ground water for their survival. Nebraska’s saline wetlands, home to a number of endangered species, are ecosystems whose development, sustenance, and survival depend on saline ground water discharge at the surface. This study demonstrates that the saline conditions present within the eastern Nebraska saline wetlands result from the upwelling of saline ground water from within the underlying Dakota Aquifer and deeper underlying formations of Pennsylvanian age. Over thousands to tens of thousands of years, saline ground water has migrated over regional scale flowpaths from recharge zones in the west to the present-day discharge …

Soil Carbon And Tree Litter Dynamics In A Red Cedar–Scotch Pine Shelterbelt, Thomas J. Sauer, Cynthia A. Cambardella, James R. Brandle

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Carbon sequestration in the woody biomass of shelterbelts has been investigated but there have been no measurements of the C stocks in soil and tree litter under this agroforestry practice. The objective of this study was to quantify C stored in surface soil layers and tree litter within and adjacent to a 35-year-old shelterbelt in eastern Nebraska, USA. The 2-row shelterbelt was composed of eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) and scotch pine (Pinus sylvestris). A sampling grid was established across a section of the shelterbelt on Tomek silt loam (fine, smectitic, mesic Pachic Argiudolls). Four soil …

Departures From Gibrat’S Law, Discontinuities And City Size Distributions, Ahjond S. Garmestani, Craig R. Allen, Colin M. Gallagher, John Mittelstaedt

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Cities are complex, self-organizing, evolving systems and the emergent patterns they manifest provide insight into the dynamic processes in urban systems. This article analyses city size distributions, by decade, from the south-eastern region of the US for the years 1860–1990. It determines if the distributions are clustered into size classes and documents changes in the pattern of size classes over time. A statistical hypothesis test was also performed to detect dependence between city size and growth using discrete probability calculations under the assumption of Gibrat’s law. The city size distributions for the south-eastern region of the US were discontinuous, with …

Estimating Business And Residential Water Supply Interruption Losses From Catastrophic Events, Nicholas Brozovic, David L. Sunding, David Zilberman

Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute: Faculty Publications

Following man-made or natural catastrophes, widespread and long-lasting disruption of lifelines can lead to economic impacts for both business and residential lifeline users. As a result, the total economic losses caused by infrastructure damage may be much higher than the value of damage to infrastructure itself. In this paper, we consider the estimation of economic impacts on businesses and residential consumers resulting from water supply disruption. The methodology we present for estimating business interruption losses assumes that marginal losses are increasing in the severity of disruption and that there may be a critical water availability cutoff below which business activity …

Parasite Findings In Archeological Remains: Diagnosis And Interpretation, Adauto Arajuo, Karl J. Reinhard, Luiz Fernando Ferreira

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Paleoparasitology has contributed to resolving the debate about the peopling of the Americas and determining the antiquity of human parasite infection. Hookworm (Ancylostomidae) and whipworm (Trichuris trichiura) and other exclusive human intestinal parasites have been recorded in pre-Columbian America. These parasite species originated in pre-hominids and have accompanied humans across continents when people went out of Africa. However, for those human populations that crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia to Alaska, cold climate conditions hampered parasite transmission. Alternative migration routes have been proposed to explain the presence of these parasites in pre-Columbian populations in the Americas. Other …

Increase In Near-Surface Atmospheric Moisture Content Due To Land Use Changes: Evidence From The Observed Dewpoint Temperature Data, Rezaul Mamood, Kenneth G. Hubbard, Ronnie D. Leeper, Stuart A. Foster

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Land use change can significantly affect root zone soil moisture, surface energy balance, and near-surface atmospheric temperature and moisture content. During the second half of the twentieth century, portions of the North American Great Plains have experienced extensive introduction of irrigated agriculture. It is expected that land use change from natural grass to irrigated land use would significantly increase nearsurface atmospheric moisture content. Modeling studies have already shown an enhanced rate of evapotranspiration from the irrigated areas. The present study analyzes observed dewpoint temperature (Td) to assess the affect of irrigated land use on near-surface atmospheric moisture content. This investigation …

Hunter-Gatherer Use Of Small Animal Food Resources: Coprolite Evidence, Karl J. Reinhard, J. R. Ambler, C. R. Szuter

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

Faunal remains are commonly found in coprolites and provide direct evidence of animal consumption. An evaluation of hunter-gatherer coprolites from the Southwest United States shows that animal bone in coprolites can be used to assess patterns of hunting, food preparation, and general importance of small animals in diet. This is demonstrated by a comparison of faunal assemblages between two hunter-gatherer sites with respect to small animal hunting strategies. The sites are Dust Devil Cave on the Colorado Plateau, an Archaic winter habitation, and Hinds Cave, a warm season Archaic habitation in the lower Pecos of Texas. The results indicate that …

Droughtscape, Summer 2007, National Drought Mitigation Center

DroughtScape: Quarterly Newsletter of the National Drought Mitigation Center (2007–2023)

Summer 07 Outlook

Hayes Named Director of NDMC

NDMC & UN Plan for Drought

Book Review: The Worst Hard Time

Drought Tools Workshops Underway

U.S. Drought Monitor Forum October 10-11, 2007 Portland, Oregon

Botanical Survey Of Fuel Reduction Areas On The Pine Ridge Ranger District Of The Nebraska National Forest, Steven B. Rolfsmeier, Leslie Stewart-Phelps

Nebraska Game and Parks Commission: White Papers, Conference Presentations, and Manuscripts

Between May and September 2006, surveys of selected areas on the Pine Ridge Unit of the Pine Ridge Ranger District in the Nebraska National Forest were carried out to document the presence of vascular plant species of known or potential conservation concern. The surveys were done in response to a request for botanical information to include in hazardous fuel projects in the East Ash and West Ash drainages. These 2006 surveys concentrated primarily on these drainages, though small forested areas were also examined in the Deadhorse Creek and Indian Creek drainages. (Data from these sites are included in the following …