Treesearch

Many regions of the world have seen an increase in highly destructive wildfires, driven by well-documented increases in burned area and growth of housing in the wildland–urban interface (WUI), which exposes more homes to fire. However, it is unclear whether wildfires are also becoming more destructive due to changes in wildfire behavior or in the development patterns of exposed communities. Here, we assessed trends in wildfire building exposure and destruction rates in the conterminous United States from 2002 to 2022. We mapped destroyed and surviving buildings within 100 m of all wildfires...

The present and future host ranges of pests have important implications for ecology, economics and health. Most multi-host pests have phylogenetically conserved host symbioses, but jumps to phylogenetically distant hosts are surprisingly common and can have large fitness consequences. We introduce a model representing host distributions as outcomes of random jumps across a host phylogeny, with jump probabilities proportional to a power function of phylogenetic distance, parallel to Lévy flights in foraging behaviour. Using machine learning, we fit our model to empirical data on insect and...

National forest inventories (NFIs) play an important role in the monitoring and management of natural resources and are typically implemented as sample-based surveys that provide a probabilistic basis for making inferences about the population being sampled. Some estimators incorporate data collected from the population that are auxiliary to the sample, especially remote sensing imagery. The study presented here examined the efficiency of some of these estimators, including the post-stratified (PS) and model-assisted estimators. It introduces an estimator that combines the efficiency of...

The land carbon sink of the conterminous United States was evaluated using a bottom-upmodeling framework and 30-meter land change data from 1985 to 2020. This cross-scale,cross-landscape, and cross-system approach tracked fractional land cover changes and applied regional model calibration. Results show average terrestrial and aquatic carbon sinks of +110 ± 37 and +19 ± 0.5 teragrams of carbon per year, respectively. The terrestrialcarbon sink, showing no clear trend, peaked in the 1990s, with more years as a carbon source since 2000, contradicting recent national and global studies. Land...

Whether the diversity and composition of animal communities are determined by vegetation structure or composition has been an ongoing debate. However, due to combined shortcomings of data and methodology, vegetation structure has been prioritised when trying to understand the effects of vegetation upon animal communities. Here, we explored the relative importance of vegetation structure and woody plant species composition on the prediction of small mammal assemblages for an Atlantic Forest landscape. Compositional (small mammals and woody plants) and vegetation structural data were...

Cover cropping, where a crop is planted but not harvested, is an important practice for maintaining soil health because it keeps like roots in the soil for as much of the year as possible. In colder temperate regions, cold-tolerant covers are available, but not widely used. We hypothesized that a cover crop that could be harvested as a valuable vegetable might increase uptake of cover cropping. We used field, high tunnel, and laboratory experiments to explore the cold tolerance and agronomic viability of overwintering peas in Vermont in the Northeastern United States. We found no difference...

The long-term sustainability of white oak (Quercus alba L.), an ecologically and economically important species in the eastern United States (US), appears to be threatened by demographic constraints. Earlier research has highlighted widespread bottlenecks in the process of recruiting white oak saplings (2.5 cm - 12.7 cm dbh) into small trees (dbh ≥ 12.7 cm). Thus, the fate of white oak saplings is a key component in understanding whether shortfalls in larger size classes are due to an onset of challenges when white oaks reach the small tree size or are an artifact of unsustainable sapling...

The emerald ash borer is an invasive pest causing widespread mortality of ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) across the USA. Broad-scale models can help identify management strategies to maintain lowland ash ecosystems. Simulating lowland forest dynamics in landscape models has been problematic because lowland hydrology is extremely complex, making most hydrology algorithms intractable at the landscape scale. A succession extension (PnET-Succession) of the LANDIS-II forest landscape model was recently updated to include simple algorithms to approximate lowland hydrology, but estimating parameters...

Silvicultural practices in forestry include activities such as site preparation, tree planting, thinning, and tree harvesting. Sometimes single trees are removed while in other cases large tracts of forest are clearcut. Logging activities bring about many environmental changes in light, temperature, soil moisture and vegetation structure, and thus can influence local plant and animal communities. Ground beetles (Carabidae) are good bioindicators of environmental change because they are (1) highly sensitive to habitat alterations, (2) diverse, (3) abundant, and (4) well known taxonomically....

Primary dispersers of seeds and spores play critical roles in structuring the distributions of species, yet the role of predators as secondary dispersers remains largely unknown. This is especially true of mycorrhizal fungi, which often rely on small mammals to consume and disperse spores. We investigated how predator size, diet, and movement influence secondary spore dispersal in a terrestrial carnivore community by quantifying spore loads in scats (dispersal quantity) and integrating movement rates with gut passage time to determine dispersal distance (dispersal quality). Spores in...