Four Carthage students are participating in Professor Joy Nystrom Mast's two-year $132,000 National Science Foundation research project to sample national forest sites attacked by bark beetles in northern Arizona. Brad Breslow, '08, Brian Jeske, '09, Amanda Eigner, '10, and Bethany Stoelting, '08, are spending their summer mapping individual tree locations, coring to age the trees, taking forestry measurements (height, width, basal area, etc.), and looking for evidence of cavity nesting birds.

Professor Mast's research project explores the causes and consequences of human activity on relationships between wildlife and their habitat requirements across a range of scales. The project seeks to describe spatial patterns, density, decay rates, and dynamics of bark beetle-killed snags (standing dead trees) in ponderosa pine forests of the American Southwest; predict the probability of snag use by cavity nesters based on these snag characteristics comparing snags killed in bark beetle outbreaks vs. individual mortality; and develop a database of bark beetle-killed snags to add to our fire-killed snag dynamics model in order to test ecological hypotheses and provide guidelines for forest managers

Direct applications of this biogeographic research include forest management decisions such as the number of snags and spatial pattern of the snags to retain in salvage logging and restoration efforts in southwestern ponderosa pine forests. Determining the transition rate from snag to fallen log is important for predicting availability of wildlife habitat. Knowing which trees or snags will remain standing longest and are most used by cavity nesters provides guidance in determining how many live tree replacements are needed and in developing future snag management plans.