Marcella A. Windmuller-Campione

Recognizing Spatial Considerations in Forest Management Planning

Purpose of ReviewThe aim is to help identify how spatial facets of forest management can be analyzed and better understood in strategic forest management planning. Focus is on stand-level spatial interdependencies potentially related to a wide range of considerations including wildlife habitat, invasive species, forest management regulations, and cost of harvest operations. Spatial facets addressed include adjacency and harvest area limitations, habitat connectivity, edge impacts, proximity considerations, and management options for restructuring stand shapes and sizes. Emphasis is on recent studies with direct connections to both forest management planning and problem structures of operations research.Recent FindingsModels related to explicit spatial facets of forest management are increasing in number, size, and complexity. Specialized approaches have been developed that are tailored to spatial facets of forestry problems. Improvements have also been made in ways of solving existing spatial models. Uncertainty is also being addressed in applications, and most recent studies tend to address multiple forest objectives.SummarySpatial interrelationships between stands are important considerations in forest planning. Operation research models can help explore the complex combinatorial nature of the situation. The need to better integrate multiple objectives over large landscapes is commonly suggested. Tradeoff analyses are important for decision makers to better understand forest-wide opportunities. New technology including parallel processing will help increase the practicality of model applications.

Quantifying impacts of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus Zimmerman) browse using forest inventory and socio-environmental datasets

Elevated population levels of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus Zimmerman) can drastically alter forest ecosystems and negatively impact society through human interactions such as deer vehicle collisions. It is currently difficult to estimate deer populations at multiple scales ranging from stand, county, state, and regional levels. This presents a challenge as natural resource managers develop silvicultural prescriptions and forest management practices aimed at successfully regenerating tree species in the face of deer browsing. This study utilized measurements of deer browse impact from the new tree regeneration indicator developed by the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program. Seedling and sapling abundance and other plot-level characteristics were analyzed across three states (Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) in the Great Lakes Region of the United States. Socio-environmental datasets (Lyme disease cases, deer vehicle collisions, and deer density estimates) were used in conjunction with FIA data to determine their predictive power in estimating deer browse impacts by county. Predictions from random forests models indicate that using Lyme disease case reports, the number of deer-vehicle collisions, deer density estimates, and forest inventory information correctly predicted deer browse impact 70–90% of the time. Deer-vehicle collisions per county ranked highly important in the random forests for predicting deer browse impacts in all three states. Lyme disease cases ranked high in importance for the Lake States combined and for Minnesota and Wisconsin, separately. Results show the effectiveness of predicting deer browse impacts using a suite of freely available forest inventory and other socio-environmental information.

Limber Pine (Pinus flexilis James), a Flexible Generalist of Forest Communities in the Intermountain West

As forest communities continue to experience interactions between climate change and shifting disturbance regimes, there is an increased need to link ecological understanding to applied management. Limber pine (Pinus flexilis James.), an understudied species of western North America, has been documented to dominate harsh environments and thought to be competitively excluded from mesic environments. An observational study was conducted using the Forest Inventory and Analysis Database (FIAD) to test the competitive exclusion hypothesis across a broad elevational and geographic area within the Intermountain West, USA. We anticipated that competitive exclusion would result in limber pine’s absence from mid-elevation forest communities, creating a bi-modal distribution. Using the FIAD database, limber pine was observed to occur with 22 different overstory species, which represents a surprising number of the woody, overstory species commonly observed in the Intermountain West. There were no biologically significant relationships between measures of annual precipitation, annual temperature, or climatic indices (i.e. Ombrothermic Index) and limber pine dominance. Limber pine was observed to be a consistent component of forest communities across elevation classes. Of the plots that contained limber pine regeneration, nearly half did not have a live or dead limber pine in the overstory. However, limber pine regeneration was greater in plots with higher limber pine basal area and higher average annual precipitation. Our results suggest limber pine is an important habitat generalist, playing more than one functional role in forest communities. Generalists, like limber pine, may be increasingly important, as managers are challenged to build resistance and resilience to future conditions in western forests. Additional research is needed to understand how different silvicultural systems can be used to maintain multi-species forest communities.