Landscape Management

We are studying post-fire forest regeneration in montane habitats within Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. By testing out different restoration strategies, as well as links between grass cover and fire, we hope to increase restored forest fire resistance and resilience.

We are testing different planting mixtures and densities to refine restoration efforts in the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge.

Feral pigs ( Sus scrofa ) have been identified as a significant problem in 120 U.S. National Wildlife Refuges. Pigs cause substantial degradation to natural ecosystems through rooting, digging, and browsing, but they are particularly destructive in Hawai‘I, which has no native terrestrial large mammals.

The terrestrial biota of the Central Pacific is primarily defined by its degree of isolation. At the center lies the Hawaiian Archipelago, which is more than 3,200 km from any continental land mass. After tens of millions of years of evolutionary isolation from all mammals except bats, islands of the Central Pacific were quite suddenly besieged by a number of alien rodents, carnivores and both...

Mesic forests of Hawai‘i island provide an ideal system for the study of forest restoration because they have a similar history to other tropical and subtropical forests globally, while maintaining a relatively simple species assemblage. Many of these forests were cleared for grazing, and then later abandoned, to become dominated by pasture grasses that form competitive layers such that native...

The Keamuku Maneuver Area (KMA) is a 9,227 ha. unit of Army Pohakuloa Training Area (PTA) on Hawai‘i Island. The Army’s mission at KMA is threatened by erosional processes that could make parts of the training area too hazardous or too degraded for sustained use. These processes depend on vegetation dynamics and the nature of the soils underlying KMA. Knowledge of the training area was...

Restoration of ecological systems in wildland areas often involves restoring species to habitats degraded by invasive plant and animal species. Often, such invasive species exert community level impacts, such as direct competition, but may also alter ecosystem function. For example, invasive plants have been documented to alter fire regimes, soil nutrients and microbes, food webs, and/or...