Although wolves (Canis lupus) and many other carnivores are habitat generalists, certain landscape features can be used to predict suitable habitat. Thiel examined the concept of road density as an important factor in the persistence of wolf populations in Wisconsin prior to the 1960s and found a relationship with the disappearance of breeding wolf populations when average road density exceeded...

I compared 101 wolf (Canis lupus) pack territories formed in Wisconsin during 1993–2004 to the logistic regression predictive model of Mladenoff et al. (1995, 1997, 1999). Of these, 60% were located in putative habitat suitabilities ,50%, including 22% in suitabilities of 0–9%. About a third of the area with putative suitabilities .50% remained unoccupied by known packs after 24 years of recolo...

Fire as a landscape process is of broad interest to ecologists and land managers. Fires alter forest age-distributions (Heinselman, 1973; Van Wagner, 1978), are sensitive to climate (Balling et al., 1992, Swetnam and Bettancourt, 1990; Swetnam, 1993; Timoney and Wein, 1991), can be manipulated by fire suppression (Baker, 1992; Barrett, 1994), and affect directions for land management policy (Hu...

Forest restoration is affected by two compounding problems. First, the goals of restoration often are unclear and involve the simultaneous consideration of a number of diverse criteria including aesthetics, biodiversity, recreation, and economic cost. Second, restoration management is a long-term process such that effects are difficult to measure at the time of implementation. Moreover, restora...

A spatially continuous representation of presettlement forest patterns has broad applications, including local and landscape-scale vegetation reconstruction, landscape change, and analysis of effects of human impact on land use change. Typically, presettlement vegetation patterns are reconstructed using historical survey data in the form of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) layers using a ...

Tree species composition and structure was determined for an old bottomland hardwood forest located in the Moro Creek Bottoms Natural Area in south-central Arkansas. Diversity for this forest was high with species richness ranging from 33 for the overstory and sapling strata to 26 for the seedling stratum and Shannon-Weiner values of 2.54 to 1.02 for the overstory and seedling strata. Sweetgum ...

Climate remains an important driver of post-European vegetation change in the eastern United States NE IL PEDERSON , † , ANTHONY W. D ’AMATO , JAMES M . DYER 3 , DAV ID R . FOSTER 4 , DAV ID GOLDBLUM , JU ST IN L . HART 6 , AMY E . HES SL 7 , LOU I S R . I VERSON , S TEPHEN T . JACKSON , 1 0 , DAR IO MART IN BEN ITO 1 1 , BR IAN C . MCCARTHY 1 2 , RYAN W. MCEWAN 3 , DAV ID J . MLADENOFF 1 4 , A...

The Pederson et al. (2014) letter deals ostensibly with their opinion that we (Nowacki & Abrams, 2014) failed to consider the lessening of drought after the 1930s as a major driver of post-European forest dynamics in the eastern U.S. We are befuddled by this because our paper includes long-term precipitation data for four study regions and we report a slight increase (2–8% change) from 1895 to ...

Hemlock, Tsuga (Pinaceae), has a disjunct distribution in North America and Asia. To examine the biogeographic history of Tsuga, phylogenetic relationships among multiple accessions of all nine species were inferred using chloroplast DNA sequences and multiple cloned sequences of the nuclear ribosomal ITS region. Analysis of chloroplast and ITS sequences resolve a clade that includes the two we...

Deforestation and colonization in Amazônia have attracted substantial attention. This article focuses on an area of 3,000 km2 within the Brazilian State of Rondônia. Two adjacent settlements were compared to assess the role of their different designs in landscape change. Anari was planned following an orthogonal road network. Machadinho was designed with attention to topography in laying out ro...