Treesearch

1. Addressing social and ecological values is a central aim of democratic environmental management and policymaking, especially during deliberative and participatory processes. Agencies responsible for managing public lands would benefit from a deepened understanding of how various publics value those lands. 2. Federal land management agencies receive millions of written comments from the public on proposed management actions annually, providing a unique source of insights into how the public assigns value to public lands. To date, little attention has been directed towards methods for...

A 2019 analysis of the urban forest in Chicago, Illinois, reveals that this area has an estimated 4.7 million live trees across all ownerships. The most common tree species by number are common buckthorn, white mulberry, and Siberian elm. Trees in Chicago are estimated to store about 754,787 tons of carbon (2.8 million tons of carbon dioxide [CO2]) valued at $128.7 million. In addition, it is estimated that these trees annually remove about 77,000 tons of CO2 and 774 tons of air pollution. Chicago’s urban forest is estimated to reduce annual energy costs of residential buildings by $1.8...

Aim: Predicting climate driven species range shifts requires knowledge of mechanisms limiting species fitness under various climatic conditions. The traditional approach of modelling ranges of herbivorous insects by fitting environmental niche models to occurrence records is generally incapable of differentiating direct effects of climate on insect populations versus indirect effects acting on the range of their host plants. Here, we delimit the southern extent of a major forest defoliator, the spruce budworm, Choristoneura fumiferana, in North America, and investigate whether its range is...

Who are the groups stewarding the environment within local communities, where do they work, and who do they work with? The Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) survey has cataloged and mapped environmental stewardship groups in dozens of cities within the US and worldwide. The survey collects relational, network ties among respondents and their collaborators. In this study, we focus on the 2019 Baltimore, Maryland survey to better understand the relationships among environmental stewardship organizations across the city. We utilize exponential random graph models (ERGMs)...

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...