Treesearch

Maintaining healthy forests requires multiple individuals, including foresters who develop timber sale silvicultural prescriptions and loggers who implement those prescriptions, resulting in the transplantation of forest health science into workable management plans. However, data on the experiences, attitudes, and opinions of these two groups are often missing when developing or refining forest health treatment strategies. To explore the role that these groups play in sustaining forest health, we examined timber sale administrators' and loggers' perspectives on treatment approaches for...

Across a city, tree communities are spatially heterogenous and vary by land use type. However, it remains unclear how urban tree communities change over time and whether rates of change depend on land use type. To address this knowledge gap, we analyzed urban tree composition using long-term plot data to examine tree diversity changes across six different urban land use types in 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014. We found that spatial differences in tree species diversity and community composition among land uses were much greater than changes over time. Number of trees increased over time, being...

Urban forestry and urban greening efforts are blossoming as cities and towns work to enhance their open spaces as green infrastructure that provides multiple benefits. This work has reached new urgency given the need for both high-performance landscapes that can mitigate the effects of climate change and accessible, safe greenspaces that can support community well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, activists, practitioners, scholars, and decision-makers–particularly those within Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and frontline communities who bear the brunt of negative...

Despite the importance of financial outcomes to stand-level forest management decision-making, long-term assessments are rare. We compared the quality and value of mixed, northern conifer (Picea–Abies–Tsuga) stands inMaine, USA, treated with a range of silvicultural systems and exploitive cuttings for 65 years. Ten replicated treatments — single-tree selection and uniform shelterwood systems, commercial clearcutting, fixed and guiding diameter-limit cutting, and no cutting — were assessed for quality and value of standing and harvested trees. Selection systems resulted in good tree quality...

Forested wetlands with high water tables are sensitive to disruption from harvesting yet support commercially desired tree species like northern white-cedar. Winter harvest was conducted in Maine, USA, to compare operational costs and productivity of cut-to-length harvesting in cedar (fragile soil) and non-cedar stands (mixedwood, sturdy soil), evaluate uncertainties in harvesting costs and influential factors, and forecast time for post-harvest recovery to pre-harvest volumes. Operational costs were calculated using detailed time and motion studies. Operational costs for the cedar stands...

Premise: Digitized collections can help illuminate the mechanisms behind the establishment and spread of invasive plants. These databases provide a record of traits in space and time that allows for investigation of abiotic and biotic factors that influence invasive species. Methods: Over 1100 digitized herbarium records were examined to investigate the invasion history and trait variation of Microstegium vimineum. Presence–absence of awns was investigated to quantify geographic patterns of this polymorphic trait, which serves several functions in grasses, including diaspore burial and...

Plant species introduced to an area in response to intentional or accidental anthropogenic events are called nonnatives. If these species spread rapidly from introduction sites (Richardson et al., 2000) and have harmful effects on the economy, environment, or health (IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), 2000), they are invasive nonnative species. There are approximately 14,000 nonnative plant species established globally (van Kleunen et al., 2015, 2019) and between 2500 (Pysek et al., 2020) and 4375 (Pagad et al., 2018) of them are considered to be invasive. Invasive...

The long-term viability of United States (US) agriculture and food systems is contingent upon sustainable soil and water conservation. Currently, the majority of conservation practices rely on voluntary adoption by farmers. However, a large and growing proportion of farmland is rented, thereby presenting a conservation decisionmaking context where tenant farmers have less control over conservation behavior than farmers who own the land they operate. For decades, social science scholarship has examined whether and how land tenure affects farmers’ conservation behavior. The overall effect of...

Running buffalo clover (Trifolium stoloniferum; RBC), is a recently delisted stoloniferous species that occurs in several eastern states of the United States. Once thought to be extinct, RBC was rediscovered in West Virginia in 1985 and it is generally accepted that it requires moderate disturbance and filtered sunlight to grow. We studied how light availability and photosynthetic parameters are related to stolon production and overall plant growth. We sampled six occurrences in the USDA Forest Service Fernow Experimental Forest (Parsons, WV) in September 2018. For each occurrence, we...

If periodically outbreaking forest insects are a generic source of forest decline, then why do outbreaks recur more periodically than decline episodes? Do standard field survey data and proxy data systematically underestimate the complexity in herbivore population dynamics? We examine three sources of previously un-analyzed time-series data (population, defoliation, and tree-ring radial growth) for the forest tent caterpillar, Malacosoma disstria Hübner (Lepidoptera: Lasiocampidae) feeding on trembling aspen, Populus tremuloides Michx. (Salicaceae), in Minnesota, in order to answer these...