Articles

The Asian longhorned beetle arrived in the United States via solid wood packing materials and continues to pose a massive threat to North American forests. Ecologist R. Talbot Trotter III from the Forest Service’s Northern Research Station worked with colleagues from the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) to develop Asian Longhorned Beetle Eradication and Risk Tracking (ALBERT) 1.0 as a toolkit to support invasive insect eradication programs. Together, these tools within ALBERT 1.0 support managers by estimating infestation risk, tracking changes over time, and evaluating management strategies.

To better understand changes in tree size-abundance relationships following disturbance, and to make it easier to estimate forest structure using remote sensing, Jonathan Knott, a Forest Service research forester, recently collaborated on research led by the University of Maine. The research team leveraged long-term forest monitoring networks in two studies, one to better understand the effects of disturbance on tree size-abundance relationships and one to develop a way to accurately estimate tree size distribution using readily available remotely sensed data. Together, these studies apply ecological theory to practical use, and their findings take steps towards more accurate predictions of forest structure across time and space.

Thanks to a powerful new online tool—the Spruce Budworm Atmospheric Transport Model (SBW-ATM)—managers can now forecast when, where, and how these moth swarms will emerge, travel, and land.

Generative text-to-image tools that use artificial intelligence (AI) can create images from keywords. This transformative technology has the potential to improve the community engagement process in landscape planning and help ensure that these projects meet the community's needs quickly without requiring extensive graphic design knowledge.

When most people think of the City of Chicago, they probably picture a modern-looking skyline rising above Lake Michigan, congested urban streets, and iconic architecture. Trees might not immediately jump to mind. However, they form a vast ecosystem amidst the urban footprint that benefits city residents in many ways.Chicago’s urban forest represents a vast natural infrastructure investment. ...

Flood damage to road-stream crossings presents a safety hazard and is expensive to repair. While crossing structure design has progressed over time to address flood resilience, little research has been conducted to evaluate the performance of culverts and bridges after floods. In 2016, an extreme flood in northwestern Wisconsin created an opportunity to address this knowledge gap.

Researchers compared two silvicultural treatments based on an irregular shelterwood with either dispersed or aggregated tree retention to transition red pine plantations in the western Great Lakes region to an overstory structure and woody plant community more representative of natural open-canopy woodlands formerly on the sites.

At the Fernow Experimental Forest, scientists examined how prescribed fire, deer exclusion, and canopy gap creation applied individually and in combination influenced seed bank diversity and composition in an Appalachian hardwood forest. Combinations of all three disturbances led to a more unique seedbank community, and prescribed fire had the strongest independent effect on seed abundance.

Collaborative research involving the Hoosier National Forest, Northern Research Station, and Purdue University revealed that regenerating oak using shelterwood and one prescribed burn on drier, less productive sites could help return oaks to the landscape in a cost-effective way.

Researchers studying the girdle-herbicide method reported an overall success rate of 55 percent in containing oak wilt spread. In clusters of four or fewer infected trees, the success rate was up to 81 percent effective.

Long-term water quality monitoring at Hubbard Brook led to the discovery of acid rain in the White Mountain National Forest and informed solutions that have reduced it over time.

From 1990 to 2020, the total wildland-urban-interface increased by 31% in area, and the number of total wildland-urban-interface houses increased by 46%, from 30 million to 44 million. Expanding wildland urban interface growth places more homes at risk to wildfire and also increases disturbance to forests.

Eastern hemlock is a foundational species in forests across the eastern United States. The invasive insect, hemlock woolly adelgid, has killed millions of hemlocks across the eastern United States and altered forest dynamics since it was first discovered in 1950. In response, forest managers have sought proactive silvicultural strategies to strengthen hemlock resilience before infestation occurs. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service are studying how thinning hemlock stands might be used as a proactive strategy against HWA establishment and spread by improving tree vigor and increasing light availability.

Northern Research Station scientists use terrestrial laser scanning to record detailed, three-dimensional data models of vegetation structures as they interact with fire in order to identify areas of high fire risk and develop targeted fuel reduction strategies. They are also investigating the complex factors that contribute to firebrand spread.

Researchers are collaborating with the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in Baraga County, Michigan to use plants to absorb heavy metals along the shorelines of Sand Point through a process called phytoremediation.

Amidst escalating risks posed by wildfires in the eastern United States, fire researchers at Silas Little Experimental Forest are making significant contributions to better understand the relationship between fuels and how fires spread across the landscape.

Assisted migration involves the selection and relocation of non-local seed sources to areas better suited to future climate conditions. The Desired Regeneration through Assisted Migration (DREAM) project is an international collaboration that seeks to diminish uncertainties through a structured process that uses basic and applied forest research to informed tree planting approaches.

Categorizing wildland-urban interface (WUI) types into intermix and interface categories allows for a deeper understanding of the ecological and management implications associated with different forms of WUI development.

New monitoring approaches with terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) developed by Northern Research Station scientists and partners are revolutionizing vegetation monitoring and helping managers collect better monitoring data faster and more easily than ever. This data allows allow managers to quantify fuel hazards, run fire behavior simulations that inform how prescribed fires and wildfires may progress under different weather and forests, and evaluate ecological impacts of different management decisions.

New physics-based models like QUIC-Fire are simple enough to run on a laptop yet complex enough to represent the physical processes and interactions among fuels and the atmosphere needed to produce accurate wildland fire predictions offer managers the opportunity for sophisticated fuel treatment and wildfire planning. Researchers used QUIC-Fire to simulate the Spring Hill and run alternative management scenarios to better understand how forest management can reduce wildfire spread.