Geos Institute

Existing fire policy encourages the maintenance of ecosystem integrity in fire management, yet this is difficult to implement on lands managed for competing economic, human safety, and air quality concerns. We discuss a fire management approach in the mid-elevations of the Sierra Nevada, California, USA, that may exemplify similar challenges in other fire-adapted regions of the western USA. We also discuss how managing for pyrodiversity through mixed-severity fires can promote ecosystem integrity in Sierran mixed conifer and ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Laws) forests. To illustrate, we show how coarse-filter (landscape-level) and complementary fine-filter (species-level) approaches can enhance forest management and conservation biology objectives as related to wildfire management. At the coarse-filter level, pyrodiverse mixed-severity fires provide landscape heterogeneity. Species and ecosystem characteristics associated with pyrodiversity can be maintained or enhanced by accommodating moderately severe fires, which hasten restoration by recreating a complex vegetation mosaic otherwise at risk from suppression. At the fine-filter level, managers can select focal species and species of conservation concern based on the degree to which those species depend on fire and accommodate their specific conservation needs. The black-backed woodpecker (Picoides arcticus [Swainson, 1832]) is an ideal focal species for monitoring the ecological integrity of forests restored through mixed-severity fire, and the California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis [Xantus de Vesey, 1860]) is a species of conservation concern that uses post-fire habitat mosaics and is particularly vulnerable to logging. We suggest a comprehensive approach that integrates wildland fire for ecosystem integrity and species viability with strategic deployment of fire suppression and ecologically based restoration of pyrodiverse landscapes. Our approach would accomplish fire management goals while simultaneously maintaining biodiversity.

Abstract We identify policies that would provide a solid foundation in key international negotiations to ensure that primary forests persist into the 21st Century. A novel compilation of primary forest cover and other data revealed that protection of primary forests is a matter of global concern being equally distributed between developed and developing countries. Almost all (98%) of primary forest is found within 25 countries with around half in five developed ones (USA, Canada, Russia, Australia, and NZ). Only ∼22% of primary forest is found in IUCN Protected Areas Categories I–VI, which is approximately 5% of preagriculture natural forest cover. Rates of deforestation and forest degradation are rapid and extensive, and the long‐term integrity of primary forest cannot be assumed. We recommend four new actions that could be included in climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable development negotiations: (1) recognize primary forests as a matter of global concern within international negotiations; (2) incorporate primary forests into environmental accounting; (3) prioritize the principle of avoided loss; and (4) universally accept the important role of indigenous and community conserved areas. In the absence of specific policies for primary forest protection, their unique biodiversity values and ecosystem services will continue to erode.

As conservation increases its emphasis on implementing change at landscape-level scales, multi-agency, cross-boundary, and multi-stakeholder networks become more important. These elements complicate traditional notions of learning. To investigate this further, we examined structures of learning in the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), which include the entire US and its territories, as well as parts of Canada, Mexico, and Caribbean and Pacific island states. We used semi-structured interviews, transcribed and analyzed using NVivo, as well as a charrette-style workshop to understand the difference between the original stated goals of individual LCCs and the values and purposes expressed as the collaboration matured. We suggest double-loop learning as a theoretical framework appropriate to landscape-scale conservation, recognizing that concerns about accountability are among the valid points of view that must be considered in multi-stakeholder collaborations. Methods from the social sciences and public health sectors provide insights on how such learning might be actualized.

The Klamath-Siskiyou Ecoregion has been a refuge for species during past climate change events, but current anthropogenic stressors are likely compromising its effectiveness as a refugium for this century's projected changes. Reducing non-climate stressors and securing protection for large, complex landscapes are important long-term actions to alleviate climate change impacts on biodiversity. Equally important is the immediate protection of a network of climate change microrefugia, particularly old growth and intact forests on north-facing slopes and in canyon bottoms, lower- and middle-elevations, wetter coastal mountains, and along elevational gradients. Such areas provide local opportunities for vulnerable species to persist within the ecoregion. We identify a provisional set of 22 highest-priority and 40 high-priority microrefugia that occur mostly outside of existing protected areas and along wetter and lower elevations of the ecoregion. Proposed reserve designs, if fully implemented, would capture most of the recommended microrefugia, although we found 11 important gaps. Most of the region's biodiversity, endemic species, and species vulnerable to climate change are invertebrates, non-vascular plants, and fungi that are largely restricted to persistently cool and moist late-successional forests. Opportunities for climate change response for vulnerable taxa will necessarily be local due to a limited capacity of many species to move to new habitat, even over relatively small distances where land use practices create inhospitable conditions. The ecoregion's distinctive and endemic serpentine-substrate flora also is at risk and possible refugia are sites that will retain wet soil conditions, such as seeps and bogs.

The world's most expansive stretch of coastal temperate and boreal rainforest issandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and a chain of coastal mountains spanning 23 degrees of latitude and some 3,600 kilometers. Here, rainforests extend from northern Kodiak Island and Prince William Sound, Alaska (61°N latitude)to just south of San Francisco Bay, California (38°N latitude; see figure 2-1). Along the coastline, rainforest is limited to moist climates extending to as muchas 160 kilometers inland in southeast Alaska and adjacent British Columbia to 60 kilometers or less in California and the Pacific Northwest. A secondary beltof rainforest up to 100 kilometers wide occurs along the western slopes of the Cascades from southern British Columbia to central Oregon.

In this paper an acoustical investigation method based on the nonlinear interaction of waves is proposed. It is assumed that only the ends of the bar are accessible for investigation.