Treesearch

Mercury is a global pollutant of critical concern but its movement through terrestrial upland systems is poorly understood. We investigated whether forest harvesting practices and varying hydrological conditions resulted in different subsurface transport pathways, fluxes and proportions of recent vs. ambient mercury in runoff. In a multiyear field experiment, we measured subsurface lateral mercury fluxes at three adjacent hillslope plots, including one that was not harvested, one where all biomass was removed after harvest, and one where residual biomass was left after harvest. Two...

Populations of the eastern whip‐poor‐will (Antrostomus vociferus; whip‐poor‐will) have declined throughout most of its range, making it a species of high conservation concern in nearly every state and province where it occurs. Researchers have reported whip‐poor‐wills are associated with forest stands with open canopies, and thus silviculture may be a promising means for promoting their populations, yet the ecological literature does not quantify fine‐scale habitat relationships capable of assisting with silviculture prescriptions. Our objective was to quantify the associations between...

Fire regimes are defined by the frequency, severity, intensity, seasonality, type, and extent of wildland fire on the landscape. These characteristics are often described at time scales spanning decades to centuries and spatial scales covering sites to regions (Parisien and Moritz 2009). Fire regimes are primarily affected by climate, topography, and ignitions, but humans have shown their ability to overwhelm the relative importance of each of these factors, not only in the past but also in the present.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change requires annual estimates for forestry and ecological indicators to monitor the change in forest resources, the sustainability of forest management, and the emission and sink of forest carbon. It is particularly important to update estimates of forestland area in a timely fashion and at flexible geographical scales, not only for its value in monitoring biological diversity at the ecosystem scale, but also because of its close association with other indicators such as forest biomass and carbon. However, in the US, the Forest Survey...

Effective invasive plant management requires collective action. However, little is known about what motivates individuals to work collectively. We conducted a mail survey of 2,600 randomly selected family forest owners in Indiana, USA to examine factors associated with community-led collective action. Specifically, we examined the role of perceived self-efficacy, perceived collective efficacy, concerns about invasive plants, and social norms associated with invasive plant management in shaping family forest owners' self-reported likelihood to work with their neighbors to remove invasive...

Every year, wildfires destroy thousands of buildings in the United States, especially in the rapidly growing wildland-urban interface, where homes and wildland vegetation meet or intermingle. After a wildfire there is a window of opportunity for residents and public agencies to re-shape patterns of development, and avoid development in locations that are inherently at higher risk of wildfire destruction. We examined 28 of the most destructive wildfires in California, the state where most buildings are destroyed by wildfires, to evaluate whether locations of rebuilt and newly constructed...

A need to quantify the impact of a particular wind disturbance on forest resources may require rapid yet reliable estimates of damage. We present an approach for combining pre-disturbance forest inventory data with post-disturbance aerial survey data to produce design-based estimates of affected forest area and number and volume of trees damaged or killed. The approach borrows strength from an indirect estimator to adjust estimates from a direct estimator when post-disturbance remeasurement data are unavailable. We demonstrate this approach with an example application from a recent...

Prescribed fire is used on more than 12 million acres (4.9 million hectares) in the United States annually. It is a critical strategic management tool for hazardous fuels reduction and the resilience of fireadapted landscapes. In recognition of its value, the President's Budget for fiscal year 2020 called for $450 million in funding for hazardous fuels reduction for USDA alone.

The Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis Motschulsky) (ALB) is an invasive polyphagous woodborer that has been introduced to North America and Europe. Due to the severe economic and ecological damage resulting from infestations of this insect, many countries, including the United States, have adopted policies of eradication. However, managing eradication can be a daunting challenge as it requires program managers to identify and destroy individual infested trees distributed across landscapes that may include millions of host trees. This report describes the use of the computer...

Data in this report come primarily from the USDA Forest Service, National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS). The NWOS is implemented by the Forest Inventory and Analysis program to answer questions related to who owns the forests, why they own it, what they have done with it in the past, and what they intend to do with it in the future. The family forest ownership results are based on random sample of 214 family forest ownerships from Wisconsin who participated in the NWOS in 2017 and 2018. The sampling errors provided below are important for assessing the reliability of the estimates. Additiona...