Treesearch

Despite sustained declines in Amazon deforestation, forest degradation from logging and fire continues to threaten carbon stocks, habitat, and biodiversity in frontier forests along the Amazon arc of deforestation. Limited data on the magnitude of carbon losses and rates of carbon recovery following forest degradation have hindered carbon accounting efforts and contributed to incomplete national reporting to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). We combined annual time series of Landsat imagery and high-density airborne lidar data to characterize the variabilit...

The United States is at an infrastructural crossroads. First, the climate is changing faster than built infrastructure and the institutions that manage and maintain it. Recent extreme weather events highlight the precarious state of the nation’s infrastructure and the ability of cities to adapt to climate change. After the nation in 2016 broiled through its hottest summer on record, 2017 began with one of the wettest winters on record for California and the Pacific Northwest. The 2017 hurricane season proved to be the most devastating and costly in the nation’s history.

Coastal plains of all tropical and subtropical latitudes are the habitat for a number of highly specialized plants able to establish in a range of sandy to clayey soils, submitted to periodical flooding from rainfall and tides, tolerant to large variations of salinity of soils interstitial water, withstanding coastal winds and sea-salt spray, and submitted to yearlong high solar irradiation and day temperatures. In northern South America semi-arid climates predominate in the southern Caribbean coasts from 10 to 15° N, an area that includes from the Goajira peninsula in Colombia to the...

Fine‐scale information about urban vegetation and social‐ecological relationships is crucial to inform both urban planning and ecological research, and high spatial resolution imagery is a valuable tool for assessing urban areas. However, urban ecology and remote sensing have largely focused on cities in temperate zones. Our goal was to characterize urban vegetation cover with sub‐meter (<1 m) resolution aerial imagery, and identify social‐ecological relationships of urban vegetation patterns in a tropical city, the San Juan Metropolitan Area, Puerto Rico. Our specific objectives were to...

A variety of physical factors such as climatic and geologic conditions and the ecological processes that take place within habitats such as succession, self-organization, and evolution generate novelty in ecosystems (sensu Radeloff et al., 2015). Hutchinson (1965) united the physical and ecological sources of novelty in his classic essay titled the ecological theater and evolutionary play. In Hutchinson’s construct, ecological novelty was the result of an evolving process (the evolutionary play) taking place within the ecological context of the habitat (the ecological theater). Hutchinson’s...

One of the challenges in the restoration of degraded lands is the re-establishment of soil structure and fertility. Novel forests that regenerate on recently abandoned and degraded agricultural lands are among the first biotic systems that begin the process of soil rehabilitation. The rate of litter decomposition and associated element mobility is one of many processes that contribute to the understanding of how ecosystem-level processes restore eroded soils. We studied the stoichiometry of Spathodea campanulata leaves decomposing in novel subtropical moist forests. We found that the speed...

Amazon droughts, including the 2015–2016 El Niño, may reduce forest net primary productivity and increase canopy tree mortality, thereby altering both the short- and the longterm net forest carbon balance. Given the broad extent of drought impacts, inventory plots or eddy flux towers may not capture regional variability in forest response to drought. We used multi-temporal airborne Lidar data and field measurements of coarse woody debris to estimate patterns of canopy turnover and associated carbon losses in intact and fragmented forests in the central Brazilian Amazon between 2013–2014...

Tropical forest disturbance (such as selective logging and fire) along with deforestation have significant contributions to the carbon source due to land-use change and anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and thus envisioned by United Nation's REDD+ programme. In previous work, spaceborne single-pass InSAR phase-center height has been shown to have the capability of accurately monitoring the subtle height change due to forest growth and degradation (with meter or even sub-meter level RMSE about the regression curve fit to time). In this paper, a new approach using spaceborne SAR interferometry...

Foresters have long applied the principle of matching site with trees in forestry. Finding suitable sites for a tree species, or finding suitable tree species for a given site, have typically been achieved through comprehensive understanding of plant–soil relationships by observations or correlation analyses. A recent study offered an eye–opening approach of using site calcium supply potentials to evaluate the site quality for tree plantations. When tree growth demand for calcium equals to site calcium supply, the site is then suitable for the tree species. Deviation from this calcium...

The Regional Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for the Americas produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provides a critical analysis of the state of knowledge regarding the importance, status, and trends of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. The assessment analyses the direct and underlying causes for the observed changes in biodiversity and in nature’s contributions to people, and the impact that these changes have on the quality of life of people. The assessment, finally, identifies a...