Animals concentrate their activities within areas we call home ranges because information about places increases fitness. Most animals, and certainly all mammals, store information about places in cognitive maps—or neurally encoded representations of the geometric relations among places—and learn to associate objects or events with places on their map. I define the value of information as a time-dependent ...

As natural resource management agencies and conservation organizations seek guidance on responding to climate change, myriad potential actions and strategies have been proposed for increasing the long-term viability of some attributes of natural systems. Managers need practical tools for selecting among these actions and strategies to develop a tailored management approach for specific targets at a given location. We developed ...

Since the late 1990s, drought-driven dieback has affected more than a million hectares of pinyon pine-juniper woodlands in the southwestern USA. Analysis of annual aerial surveys by the US Forest Service and soil survey data shows that most of the mortality occurred between 2003 and 2004 and that 70% was restricted to soils mapped as having available water storage capacities ...

Surging wildfires across the globe are contributing to escalating residential losses and have major social, economic, and ecological consequences. The highest losses in the U.S. occur in southern California, where nearly 1000 homes per year have been destroyed by wildfires since 2000. Wildfire risk reduction efforts focus primarily on fuel reduction and, to a lesser degree, on house characteristics ...

Chaparral shrublands in southern California, US, exhibit significant biodiversity but are prone to large,intense wildfires. Debate exists regarding fuel reduction to prevent such fires in wildland areas, but the effects of these fires on fauna are not well understood. We studied whether fire severity and distance from unburned fire perimeter influenced recovery of the small-mammal community from 13 to ...