Treesearch

Background: As vacant lot inventories expand in cities across the U.S., vacant land management organizations require strategies that optimize their functioning while ensuring community benefit. Resident engagement in programs to green vacant land may be one helpful strategy. While resident engagement is often required for vacant land management organizations, few researchers have examined how these organizations engage residents and the effect of these practices on their functioning. We hypothesized that more intensive engagement such as involving residents in planning and implementing...

Given the large and increasing amount of urban, suburban, and exurban land use on Earth, there is a need to accurately assess net primary productivity (NPP) of urban ecosystems. However, the heterogeneous and dynamic urban mosaic presents challenges to the measurement of NPP, creating landscapes that may appear more similar to a savanna than to the native landscape replaced. Studies of urban biomass have tended to focus on one type of vegetation (e.g., lawns or trees). Yet a focus on the ecology of the city should include the entire urban ecosystem rather than the separate investigation of...

Warming is expected to increase the net release of carbon from peatland soils, contributing to future warming. This positive feedback may be moderated by the response of peatland vegetation to rising atmospheric [CO2] or to increased soil nutrient availability. We asked whether a gradient of wholeecosystem warming (from + 0 °C to + 9 °C) would increase plant-available nitrogen and phosphorus in an ombrotrophic bog in northern Minnesota, USA, and whether elevated [CO2] would modify the nutrient response. We tracked changes in plant-available nutrients across space and through time and in...

Pinus rigida (Pitch Pine)–Quercus ilicifolia (Scrub Oak) barrens require active management to maintain, but the effects of forest management on snakes and game birds is poorly understood. We conducted vegetation surveys and examined incidental encounter data of a variety of snake and game bird species on a managed pine barren in Montague, MA, from 2008 to 2018. We recorded 73 observations, including 44 Coluber constrictor constrictor (Northern Black Racer) and 7 Meleagris gallopavo (Wild Turkey) nests. All of our observations were in managed habitats (Scrub Oak, treated Pitch Pine, and...

Soils in urban natural areas can be highly variable due to legacies of land use change that include excavation of existing soils and dumping of construction debris or other anthropogenic materials. As cities undertake large-scale tree planting efforts to sustain and increase forest cover, understanding how urban soil quality influences native tree seedling survival and performance is important. In a greenhouse setting we examined growth and physiology of native silver maple (Acer saccharinum), black birch (Betula lenta), red oak (Quercus rubra), and Canadian serviceberry (Amalanchier...

The Eastern Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vociferus: hereafter whip-poor-will) has been declining from historical population levels throughout its range in the northeast. Although whip-poor-wills have been reported to use a variety of habitats, most recent studies have associated whip-poor-wills with open canopy habitats, such as early-successional habitats or forest edges. However, there remain substantial gaps in our understanding of whip-poor-wills’ habitat associations. For example, historical accounts state that whip-poor-wills roost and nest in forest and forage in openings, and thus,...

The oak wilt disease caused by the invasive fungal pathogen Bretziella fagacearum is one of the greatest threats to oak-dominated forests across the Eastern United States. Accurate detection and monitoring over large areas are necessary for management activities to effectively mitigate and prevent the spread of oak wilt. Canopy spectral reflectance contains both phylogenetic and physiological information across the visible near-infrared (VNIR) and short-wave infrared (SWIR) ranges that can be used to identify diseased red oaks. We develop partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA)...

Context. Forest type (FT) classification provides useful information to ecologists and forest managers by representing similar sites based on species dominance. Various methods have been developed using stand-level or plot-level information, however, these classifications are not always effective at representing broader landscape patterns of species diversity. Objectives. We classified landscape-level FTs from species habitat models and compared against classifications intended for stand-level information. We used a departure score to assess potential changes to current FT from projected...

In the 1930's the Federal Home Loan Bank Board established a program to appraise real estate risk levels in several cities. Four classes indicating level of security for real estate investments were developed: A (green) – best, B (blue) – still desirable, C (yellow) – declining, and D (red) – hazardous. Recent studies have shown that heat island effects are greater, imperviousness is higher, and tree cover lower in areas that were formerly redlined (class D). This paper analyzed all redlined areas in U.S. cities and confirms that redlined areas (class D) have lower tree cover, greater...

When sawing a log into lumber or other products, the saw blade removes material to separate the wood fibers between the resulting two parts, a loss of material that is commonly referred to as saw kerf. Thicker kerfs result in greater waste and less material available to produce lumber. Over the past decades, with the advancement of materials and technology, saw blade thickness has decreased. However, the reduction in material loss owing to a reduction in saw kerf may not always translate into a statistically significant increase in lumber product recovery. In this study, we explored the...