Government lawyers said the Forest Service could be sued again if it went ahead with the old plan on a now fundamentally altered forest, Mr. Harp said, so foresters are reassessing the impact of thinning in a dead forest.
Increasing incursions by humans into forests, coupled with altered forest ecology and climate change, will make fires bigger and more destructive, with implications for air quality as well as homes and infrastructure.
The immediate reduction of human-induced fire is necessary to move these altered forest ecosystems towards the range of natural structural conditions and reestablish the historical variability of this ecological process.
Restoring altered forest landscapes toward their ranges of natural variability (RNV) may enhance ecosystem sustainability and resiliency, but such efforts can be hampered by complex land ownership and management patterns.
The analysis of thin sections revealed major differences in the microstructure and porosity, as well as in the characteristics of the fine fraction and organic constituents, together with other pedological features, corroborating the different dynamics and types of soil in the natural or altered forest landscape.
Manipulating these altered forests to promote development of larger patches of older, larger, and more widely-spaced trees with diverse understories will increase landscape resistance to severe fires, and enhance wildlife habitat for underrepresented conditions.
If these altered forests can provide suitable habitat for many forest species, their role in forest wildlife conservation needs to be reconsidered.
We investigated the role played by the bonobo (Pan paniscus) in a human-altered forest-savanna mosaic in Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Perceptions of benefits from forests were strongest: in human-altered forest landscapes for cultural and spiritual benefits; in human-altered and intact forests landscapes for health benefits; intact forest for direct health benefits, such as medicinal plants; and in regions with little forest and extensive plantations, for environmental benefits, such as climatic impacts from deforestation.
Therefore, common mammal species are influenced by livestock and logging in different ways which necessarily may be taken into account in management and conservation decisions in Mediterranean human-altered forests.
We collapsed land use and habitat structure variables into independent habitat vectors using principle component analysis (PCA) and then used a general linear model (GLM) to explain the relationships between red fox and wild boar abundance and the independent habitat vectors observed in human-altered forests.
