Rocky Mountain Research Station

Human Recreation and Fire History Shape Landscape Connectivity for an Endangered Forest Carnivore

ABSTRACT Habitat connectivity is critical for long‐term wildlife population persistence, yet the permeability of landscape features can vary with human activity and disturbance history. Characterizing landscape features influencing permeability is critical for landscape planning...

Functional memory of drought affects leaf chemical defenses and microbial interactions in aspen

Abstract Drought is an increasingly important driver of tree mortality, but its long-term impacts on trait expression remain poorly understood. Leaves are a key interface at which trees respond to abiotic stress, and foliar traits such as chemical defenses and microbial communiti...

Automated workflow demonstrates mixed treatment impacts on burn severity across ecoregion scales

Background Intensifying wildfire activity in western North America has motivated focus on fuel treatments as a tool for moderating fire severity. Treatment effectiveness is influenced by complex interactions among biophysical settings, treatments and weather. Aims This study intr...

Adapting for solitude: Stress-coping, substitution behaviors, and intentions to return in wilderness recreation

Increasing visitation to Wilderness Areas is intensifying pressure on ecological conditions and visitor experience quality, highlighting gaps in current monitoring systems that rely heavily on biophysical indicators while overlooking visitor-based psychological and experiential d...

Biomass inventory optimization for willow-based pellet production integrating seasonal supply and stochastic demand

Biomass supply chains face both internal challenges (low energy density, bulkiness, seasonality) and external challenges (market uncertainty). We developed a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model that configures an (s, S) inventory control policy for...

Building global range maps for terrestrial insects with species range kernels and modeled aggregations of georeferenced records

Range maps for most terrestrial invertebrates generally are not accessible as spatial data. My objective was to build global range maps for 11,844 terrestrial insect species, specifically pollinator species with at least 400 georeferenced records each, by applying species range k...

An interpretable remote sensing–machine learning framework for wildfire soil burn severity prediction in the northwestern United States

Background Although soil burn severity (SBS) is traditionally mapped post-fire, pre-fire predictive approaches remain limited despite their potential to identify areas at risk of soil degradation, runoff and erosion. Aim To develop a large-scale model for predicting post-fire SBS...