Treesearch

Traditional forestry, ecology, and fuels monitoring methods can be costly and error-prone, and are often used beyond their original assumptions due to difficulty or unavailability of more appropriate methods. These traditional methods tend to be rigid and may not be useful for detecting new ecological changes or required data at modern levels of precision. The integration of Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) methods into forest monitoring strategies can cost effectively standardize data collection, improve efficiency, and reduce error, with datasets that can easily be analyzed to better...

Infrastructure systems have direct implications for how health and well-being evolve across urban–rural systems. Scientists, practitioners, and policy-makers use domain-specific methods and tools to characterize sectors of infrastructure, but these approaches do not capture the cascading effects across interrelated infrastructure and governance domains. We argue that the development and management of sustainable urban infrastructure must focus on interactions across urban and rural places to advance equitable health and well-being. We call for a research agenda that focuses on urban–rural...

To promote the sustainability of forest ecosystems and maintain ecosystem services to human populations in the context of climate change, forest managers are considering several adaptation tools. One of those, assisted migration, consists of displacing tree species and/or populations to locations with suitable future climate conditions. Assisted migration plantations, however, could fail to produce viable forests under high herbivory pressure from mammalian herbivores. Thus, selecting species and genotypes with low susceptibility to herbivores could be a key condition for the recruitment...

Resource selection is a dynamic process driven by habitat valuation and risk avoidance in heterogeneous landscapes. Resource selection and movement decisions of individuals may be sensitive to intrinsic factors, such as body condition, and variation in these choices may have consequences on subsequent survival. We evaluated northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) brood resource selection patterns to quantify utility of different cover types during the development period using integrated step-selection analysis in a Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework with three brood stages: flightless...

Elevated acid deposition has been a concern in the central Appalachian region for decades. A long-term acidification experiment on the Fernow Experimental Forest in centralWest Virginia was initiated in 1996 and continues to this day. Ammonium sulfate was used to simulate elevated acid deposition. A concurrent lime treatment with an ammonium sulfate treatment was also implemented to assess the ameliorative effects of base cations to offset acidification. We show that the forest vegetation simulator growth model can be locally calibrated and used to project stand growth and development over...

There is growing need to quantify and communicate how land use and management activities influence soil organic carbon (SOC) at scales relevant to, and in the tangible control of landowners and forest managers. The continued proliferation of publications and growth of data sets, data synthesis and meta-analysis approaches allows the application of powerful tools to such questions at ever finer scales. In this analysis, we combined a literature review and effect-size meta-analysis with two large, independent, observational databases to assess how land use and management impact SOC stocks,...

Hydrologic shifts due to climate change will affect the cycling of carbon (C) stored in boreal peatlands. Carbon cycling in these systems is carried out by microorganisms and plants in close association. This study investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated water tables (lowered and raised) and plant functional groups on the peat and root microbiomes in a boreal rich fen. All samples were sequenced and processed for bacterial, archaeal (16S DNA genes; V4), and fungal (internal transcribed spacer 2 [ITS2]) DNA. Depth had a strong effect on microbial and fungal communities across...

The rarity of rapid campaigns to characterize soils across scales limits opportunities to investigate variation in soil carbon stocks (SOC) storage simultaneously at large and small scales, with and without site-level replication. We used data from two complementary campaigns at 40 sites in the United States across the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), in which one campaign sampled profiles from closely co-located intensive plots and physically composited similar horizons, and the other sampled dozens of pedons across the landscape at each site. We demonstrate some consistenci...

The recognized gap between research and implementation in avian conservation can be overcome with translational ecology, an intentional approach in which science producers and users from multiple disciplines work collaboratively to co-develop and deliver ecological research that addresses management and conservation issues. Avian conservation naturally lends itself to translational ecology because birds are well studied, typically widespread, often exhibit migratory behaviors transcending geopolitical boundaries, and necessitate coordinated conservation efforts to accommodate resource and...

Predator fear effects influence reproductive outcomes in many species. In non-urban systems, passerines often respond to predator cues by reducing parental investment, resulting in smaller and lighter nestlings. Since trophic interactions in urban areas are highly altered, it is unclear how passerines respond to fear effects in human-altered landscapes. Nestlings of passerines in urban areas also tend to be smaller and lighter than their rural counterparts and are often exposed to high densities of potential predators yet experience lower per capita predation—the predation paradox. We...