Treesearch

This summary report provides an overview of findings from the fourth annualized inventory of Missouri forests based on data collected from 2012 to 2018. Forest land area remained stable at 15.4 million acres, and 80 percent of forest land is in the oak/hickory forest-type group. Forests in the State continue to mature with 64 percent in large diameter stands and 61 percent in stands older than 60 years of age. Live tree net volume on timberland totals 20.9 billion cubic feet, and 79 percent of that volume is in growing-stock trees. Mortality increased by 17 percent from 2013 to 2018 to 333...

Wood products research and development at the USDA Forest Service is most concentrated at the venerable Forest Products Laboratory, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Urban wood use and market development is a unique area of study done in collaboration with city, state, and private partners in metropolitan areas across the United States. Urban trees are not removed for their wood value, but rather due to storm damage, safety, insects and disease, or other reasons. Yet, how the tree is removed impacts future options and potential value of the wood.

We work in places of incredible diversity - of people and landscapes. Embracing this diversity in all its forms helps us to enhance the reach and relevance of our public programs and improve our management practices. How can municipal arborists and urban foresters meaningfully connect with and be informed by different ways of seeing, knowing, thinking, valuing, and approaching the work of caring for our urban and community forests? This article spotlights principles and pathways for successful community engagement, organizing, and two-way learning discovered through our research, and...

Privately-owned forests provide important environmental, economic, and cultural benefits to the general public. Resulting impacts from landownership changes and conversion of working forests to other land uses threaten these benefits. The USDA Forest Service Forest Legacy Program (FLP) permanently protects threatened private forests that are of environmental, cultural, and economic importance to the greater public while keeping land ownership and forest management at the private or local level. FLP provides grants to state agencies to purchase conservation easements on private forestlands...

The hemlock woolly adelgid (Hemiptera: Adelgidae Adelges tsugaeAnnand) poses a serious threat to hemlocks in eastern North America, and ongoing research is focused on the identification and development of biological controls to protect and manage hemlock resources. Three predators native to the Pacific Northwest of North America that have been the focus of much research are Leucopis argenticollis(Zetterstedt), Leucopis piniperda(Malloch) (Diptera: Chamaemyiidae), and Laricobius nigrinus(Fender) (Coleoptera: Derodontidae). This study addresses the knowledge gap of adult Leucopisspp....

Resource selection is a key component in understanding the ecological processes underlying population dynamics, particularly for species such as northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus), which are declining across their range in North America. There is a growing body of literature quantifying breeding season resource selection in bobwhite; however, winter information is particularly sparse despite it being a season of substantial mortality. Information regarding winter resource selection is necessary to quantify the extent to which resource requirements are driving population change. We...

Masting is the synchronous and highly variable production of fruit within a population. Although several hypotheses have been proposed to explain why and how masting evolved in plants as a reproductive strategy, the factors that trigger a large reproductive effort in a particular year are still not well understood. While both weather and resources have been proposed to play an important role, testing these hypotheses has been challenging due to a lack of longterm data and appropriate experimental designs. In this manuscript, we used 18 years of acorn production data to analyze the relations...

Cities worldwide are engaging in large-scale greening projects motivated by the wide range of documented ecological, economic, and social benefits of urban forests. Urban forested natural areas are a critical component of the total urban forest but are often overlooked and typically lack formal management frameworks. One approach to addressing this deficiency may be to borrow from traditional ecological management frameworks and practices (that is, silviculture). Although urban forested natural areas share similarities with rural forests, the impacts of urbanization on forest stand...

In northeastern North America, group selection is frequently used in northern hardwood forests to maintain uneven-aged stand structure and promote regeneration of tree species spanning a range of shade tolerances. For this study, long-term application of group selection at the Bartlett Experimental Forest, New Hampshire, USA, provided a unique opportunity to address cohort- and stand-level progression after 80 years of treatment. Cohort-level evolution reflected successional and developmental dynamics associated with even-aged forest systems, whereas aggregate stand-level conditions were...

Nest boxes are commonly used for species that utilize tree cavities, including small owls. Boxes were installed in 2011 to facilitate study of Northern Saw-whet Owls in Pennsylvania. We checked the 11 boxes that remained in 2020 after a hiatus of 8 years and found 3 rodent nests, but no evidence of owl usage. Playbacks revealed owls were present at 8 of 11 boxes checked. Cavity surveys yielded an average of 7.7 large cavities within 50 m of each box; extrapolation of cavity densities to a minimal territory size of 150 ha suggested that suitable cavities are an abundant, non-limiting...