Treesearch

Urban forest patches experience a wide variety of anthropogenic and environmental stressors, including recurrent canopy gap-creating events, herbivory pressure, and invasive species. Forest restoration strategies to overcome these stressors frequently rely on enhancing tree regeneration, including tree-planting. Pre-planting treatment strategies are a crucial preparatory step in establishing appropriate site conditions to ensure successful long-term tree regeneration. However, many pre-planting treatments rely on synthetic herbicide, which can be associated with adverse environmental...

North American grasslands are climate-vulnerable biomes that provide critical ecosystem services and support biodiversity. However, grasslands are often not included in climate policy and treaties, and they are underrepresented in ecological climate-adaptation literature. We synthesized existing knowledge on climate adaptation in North American grasslands to provide resources and guidance for grassland managers facing increasing climate change impacts. We leveraged data from a systematic review and solicited input from management professionals at workshops to create a Grassland Adaptation...

Wildfire impacts on communities and forests are a growing crisis in the United States. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service launched a major investment in landscape-level treatments to reduce hazardous fuels, which focused on 10 priority landscapes across eight states in the Western United States. Although these landscapes were designed to encompass communities facing high levels of wildfire risk, it is less clear how other community characteristics might vary, including sociodemographics, wildfire history, and past efforts to reduce wildfire risk. The goal of this...

Understanding landowner motivations and barriers is critical to the success of conservation programs. In 2020, we conducted a survey of family forest owners in Vermont related to expert visits, patch cuts, and applying for cost-share funds. We analyzed the activities using the Transtheoretical Model of Behavioral Change (TTM) and ordinal logistic regression. The TTM stage of change varied by activity with 68% of the respondents being in the Action stage for expert visits, 29% being in the Action stage for patch cuts, and 14% being in the Action stage for cost-share. The significant...

National Forest Inventories (NFIs) provide statistically reliable information on forest resources at national and other large spatial scales. As forest management and conservation needs become increasingly complex, NFIs are being called upon to provide forest parameter estimates at spatial scales smaller than current design-based estimation procedures can provide. This is particularly true when estimates are desired by species or species groups, which is often required to inform wildlife habitat management, sustainable forestry certifications, or timber product assessments. Here we propose...

Invasive plants often can self‐pollinate and have higher reproductive outputs than native counterparts. Pollinator declines may exacerbate disparities in reproductive output by negatively impacting native plants more than invasives.To determine how pollinator availability affects reproductive success of two species (one native, one invasive), we conducted a pollinator exclusion experiment for two functionally similar species: the invasive musk thistle Carduus nutans and native field thistle Cirsium discolour. We manipulated pollinator access to flowers by partially or completely excluding...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Iowa. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all the...

Context: Seed dispersal is a spatially continuous process occurring over areas ranging from tens to thousands of square meters. Current seed dispersal designs (CDD) in forest landscape models (FLMs) have notable limitations. CDD may fail to disperse seeds outward when cell size exceeds dispersal distance and commonly assumes seed sources are centrally located within cell. The problems can accumulate spatially and temporally leading to large prediction errors.Objectives: We propose a spatially independent dispersal design (SID) that overcomes the pitfalls of CDD. SID assumes seed sources...

Forests face an increasing number of threats, which are expected to increase in frequency and intensity in the future. Recent calls have pointed out the need for holistic approaches when developing forest management policies, which requires a broad understanding of how forest owners perceive the uncertainties and risks that may threaten their forests. In this paper, we study a set of sixteen concerns in the United States National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS). Our set of concerns span an array of types and causes—natural and anthropogenic—that capture multiple aspects of forest ownership....

Marchalina hellenica (Gennadius) (Hemiptera: Marchalinidae), endemic to Greece and Türkiye, infests various pine species in both countries. Apart from its native range, this species has been recorded infesting pine trees in Italy [Campania (island of Ischia) and Marche regions], Croatia, and recently in Australia. While not a severe pest in its native habitat, M. hellenica has been found to negatively impact pines in the invaded regions.Neoleucopis kartliana (Tanasijtshuk) (Diptera: Chamaemyiidae), a key natural enemy of M. hellenica in its native range, was introduced from Greece to...