Airborne lidar is often used to calculate forest metrics about trees, but it may also provide a wealth of information the space between trees. Forest canopy gaps are defined by absence vegetative structure and serve important roles for wildlife, such as facilitating animal movement. occur around snags, keystone structures that substrates wildlife species breeding, roosting foraging. We wanted t...

This paper documents data on standing dead trees (snags) in the pine-spruce (Norway spruce Picea abies, Scots pine Pinus sylvestris) natural stand in Bialowieza National Park (BNP) in northeast Poland. Trophically, this mostly coniferous stand represents one of the poorest habitats of the BNP, and this stand has never been cut. There are few tree species of significance, i.e., Scots pine, Norwa...

More than 100 species of vertebrates in the Pacific Northwest use standing dead trees (snags) at one time or another in their lifecycle (Thomas et al. 1979a, Neitro et al. 1985). With few exceptions, investigators have found significant correlations between snag density and the abundance of primary cavity-nesters in North American coniferous forests (Raphael and White 1984:47-53, Madsen 1985, Z...

Areas of mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) outbreaks in the Black Hills can provide habitat for black-backedwoodpeckers (Picoides arcticus), a U.S. Forest Service, Region 2 Sensitive Species. These outbreaks are managed through removal of trees infested with mountain pine beetles to control mountain pine beetle populations and salvage timber resources. To minimize impacts t...

Snags and coarse woody debris are important elements of the structure and function of mixed conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada. In this paper, we report on the impacts of several replicated fuel treatments including, prescribed fire, commercial thinning (crown thinning and thinning from below) followed by rotary mastication of understory trees, mechanical followed by prescribed fire, and cont...

Old-growth forests are valuable sources of ecological, conservation, and management information, yet these ecosystems have received little study in New England, due in large part to their regional scarcity. To increase our understanding of the structures and processes common in these rare forests, we studied the abundance of downed coarse woody debris (CWD) and snags and live-tree size-class di...

Relatively intense burning has been suggested as a possible alternative to the restoration of pre-European settlement forest conditions and fire regime in mixed conifer forests, in contrast to thinning of trees and light prescribed burning. In 1993 a management-ignited fire in a dense, never-harvested forest in Grand Canyon National Park escaped prescription and burned with greater intensity an...