Treesearch

We present Stewardship Salons as meaningful engagements with different ways of knowing and caring for ecosystems. They are facilitated as non‐hierarchical gatherings where everyone has the ability to be a teacher and a learner. This approach was first inspired by an exchange between NYC‐based practitioners and Native Hawaiian educators and practitioners in 2017. Since then, partners from U.S. Forest Service and NYC Parks have organized experiential salons that engage land managers, artists, researchers, and practitioners in learning from place and each other. Salons are rooted in co‐learnin...

Natural disturbance is increasing in temperate forests worldwide as global change impacts intensify, potentially shifting the balance between forest harvesting and natural disturbance as drivers of biomass change and forest dynamics. Using national forest inventory data, we show that the balance between forest harvesting and natural mortality shifted considerably over the past two decades in the northeastern USA due to a rise in natural mortality, with harvesting accounting for 5% greater biomass loss than natural mortality in 2009 but natural mortality accounting for 39% greater biomass...

Human-wildlife research has frequently examined attitudes toward single species, especially carnivores and mammals in rural areas. Recent research has expanded in scope to evaluate urban residents’ multifaceted attitudes toward multiple species or taxa. This paper presents a taxonomically inclusive examination of attitudes toward small mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona (USA) using survey measures that inform human-wildlife coexistence, specifically: tolerance of common wildlife, appreciation of different pollinators, and stewardship of iconic species in...

Understanding forest canopy structure is essential for monitoring ecosystem function, carbon dynamics, and wildfire risk. In this study, we developed an unsupervised classification framework that integrates 21 LiDAR-derived vertical structure metrics with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) to characterize canopy heterogeneity across the Kawishiwi Ranger District of the Superior National Forest in Minnesota, USA. The resulting structural classes support ladder- and canopy-fuel–relevant assessment and management. The PCA-based dimensionality reduction preserved...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station provides sound science on the health and use of the Nation’s forests and grasslands and delivers scientific knowledge and innovative technologies to inform land management decisions. While much of this research happens in rural forests, residential lands are abundant and also the subject of studies because residential yards offer substantial, and often overlooked, opportunities to conserve and protect plants and wildlife in urban, suburban, and rural landscapes.In the United States, yards make up more than four...

Forests of the northeastern US have experienced multiple environmental changes over the last three decades, including rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations and declines in acidic deposition, including nitrogen (N) deposition. We used measurements over a 32-year time span (1992–2023) from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, New Hampshire, USA to assess the overall impact of these environmental changes on foliar chemistry (N, carbon, and phosphorus concentrations) and isotopic composition (δ15 N and δ 3 C) of three dominant northern hardwood species: sugar maple, American...

The US Gulf Coastal Plain is a region of diverse forests and management systems and dynamic land use changes. These drivers affect carbon (C) stocks at ecosystem to regional scales, in turn affecting processes such as forest regeneration, hydrologic and biogeochemical cycling, and social and economic systems. We quantified land use change and forest management effects on C stocks in the Gulf Coastal Plain, focusing on soils, using two complementary approaches: meta-analysis of published literature and analysis of forest inventory data. Land use change had larger effects than forest...

Fire suppression in the upper U.S. Midwest has led to the expansion of flammable coniferous ladder fuels, necessitating precise tracking of conifer species basal area (BA) for fire risk management. This study benchmarks four subset-selection pipelines—xPLS, GA-xPLS, RF-xPLS, and SVR-xPLS—to optimize the fusion of high-dimensional, collinear data from Sentinel-2, Landsat-9, and LiDAR sensors. Using 141 field plots in Minnesota’s Kawishiwi Ranger District of the Superior National Forest, we evaluated 175 predictors against eight BA response variables. Results show that RF-xPLS provided the...

Forests can occur across a continuum of urban-rural land-use contexts. Forests in cities (also referred to as forest patches, urban woodlots, urban forest fragments, or urban forested natural areas) are ecologically akin to wildland forests, but located in dense, urban landscapes. Here, we examine the opportunities and constraints for managing oak forests in cities to demonstrate the value of leveraging urban forests to develop and test adaptive management strategies for oak forests. Oaks dominate eastern United States forest types but face widespread regeneration failure across the...

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 Minnesota. 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...