Treesearch

Urban trees mitigate extreme heat through shading and evapotranspiration, but cooling effectiveness varies with tree traits, spatial configurations, and climate. This systematic mapping review synthesizes findings from 115 studies (2018 to 2024) using Reporting standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses (ROSES) protocols. Studies were categorized based on geographic location, climate zone, and heat metric (e.g., land surface temperature or air temperature), highlighting a geographic skew toward North America and Asia and underrepresentation of arid and tropical zones. Findings show that...

Peatlands store about one third of global soil carbon despite occupying less than 5% of the land area. Recent estimates show that tropical peatlands store much more carbon than previously thought. There are considerable gaps in knowledge regarding the interannual variability of carbon budgets in tropical peatlands and the way that changing environmental conditions influence the carbon cycling in these ecosystems. We show that a palm swamp peatland in the Peruvian Amazon is sensitive to changes in environmental conditions and can flip from a large carbon sink to carbon neutral when there...

Fusiform rust, caused by the pathogen Cronartium quercuum (Berk.) Miyabe ex Shirai f. sp. fusiforme, is the most important disease of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) in the U.S., causing millions of dollars in damage each year. Using resistant genotypes has proven a successful strategy to limit the disease, but resistance selection still relies on visual inspection for symptoms, which can lead to misclassification due to human error and the presence of ‘escaped susceptibles’ (i.e., susceptible individuals with no visible symptoms due to either an extended asymptomatic phase of the disease...

Non-destructive tree phenotyping for resistance screening and early, presymptomatic disease detection figures prominently among the most important practical limitations inherent in forest health management. The need for point-of-care tools is particularly acute for managing diseases caused by non-native pathogens, often resulting in difficult-to-control biological invasions. One such case is represented by ash dieback in Europe, caused by Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, which has led Sweden to red-list its main host, European ash (Fraxinus excelsior). We evaluated the use of near-infrared (NIR)...

Common-pool resources (CPRs), including fisheries and the atmosphere, are critical for ecological, social, and economic sustainability but are easily overused. We use an agent-based model to investigate how social networks shape resource extraction outcomes. Networks with highly visible nodes can create a ‘‘majority illusion’’ in which most users believe high-intensity extraction is dominant, even if it is not. This misperception can push the entire population toward one of two possible states: an abundant, high-welfare resource or a depleted, low-welfare one. Aligning users’ environmental...

Climate and topography have long been recognized as the primary drivers of broad-scale geographic patterns in tree species abundance, demography, and occurrence, but within species ranges, forest disturbance regimes also play a fundamental role by affecting mortality, growth, and recruitment of tree species. Although forests are generally adapted to certain levels of disturbance, the intensification of disturbance regimes over recent decades highlights a pressing need to move beyond a purely climate-based understanding of tree species dynamics and to integrate the role of disturbance into...

Catchment studies are foundational to hydrological and biogeochemical process understanding that has informed resource management, policy development and societal well-being (Burt and McDonnell 2015; Likens 2021; Tetzlaff et al. 2017). These place-based studies with sustained monitoring have shaped understanding of fundamental ecosystem processes and consequences of environmental change on ecosystems (Campbell et al. 2022; Hewlett, Lull, and Reinhart 1969; Jones et al. 2012; Latron and Lana-Renault 2018; Lovett et al. 2007; McNamara et al. 2018). The special issue, Research and Observatory...

The Central Appalachian region contains several high-elevation endemic woodland salamanders, which are thought to be particularly vulnerable to climate change due to their restricted distributions and low vagility. In West Virginia, there is a strong management focus on protection and recovery of the federally threatened Cheat Mountain salamander Plethodon nettingi. To support this focus, there is a need for improved understanding of the occurrence–habitat relationships and spatially explicit projections of fine-scale contemporary and potential future habitat quality to inform management...

Soil seed banks are the hidden reservoir of forest plant diversity. Seed banking is a reproductive adaptation that allows plants to persist belowground as dormant seeds, where the soil serves as a buffer from aboveground disturbances. They play a key role in the recovery of forests post-disturbance, and it’s the post-disturbance plant recovery that replenishes, or makes seed deposits, in the seed bank. Since certain plant species are favored or disfavored by the type of forest disturbance, seed banks can vary depending on the disturbance affecting aboveground plants, and the abundance and...

Firewood banks are community-driven initiatives that aim to reduce fuel poverty by providing firewood to households facing heating insecurity. As firewood bank expansion continues, there is an emergent urgency to understand their operations, processes, capacities, and challenges. We formally surveyed known firewood bank leaders and evaluated the results through the framework of a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis to better understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of firewood banks more broadly. Further understanding of firewood bank...