Treesearch

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, National Best Management Practices (BMP) program assists in meeting agency Clean Water Act objectives with nationally consistent monitoring. National BMP program monitoring protocols are used to evaluate BMP implementation (including planning) and effectiveness for most types of land disturbing activities that occur on national forests and grasslands. This report summarizes data from the first two full monitoring periods—federal fiscal years 2015–2016 and 2017–2018—for wildland fire, recreation, and water uses management protocols. Best...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly used to build urban climate resilience by employing natural features and processes. Implementing NBS in urban residential areas relies on the availability of unsealed soil surfaces. Here we investigate how soil is distributed at fine spatial scales across Los Angeles County, the second largest metropolitan area in the United States, to examine the potential for NBS to be realized equitably. We delineate soil patches in residential areas across a range of socioeconomic settings and urban forms, and then compare soil patch metrics to social...

Urban tree canopy provides benefits, but is not equitably distributed across neighborhoods, which is an environmental distributive injustice. Trees take time to grow, so historic neighborhood conditions explain, in part, present-day conditions and the inequitable distribution of tree canopy and associated benefits. In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created to help develop new housing and promote homeownership by insuring home loans, and consequently helped shape urban development. In 1937, the FHA ranked neighborhoods in Washington, DC, and the greater metropolitan area...

The spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) and spongy moth (Lymantria dispar) are notorious invasive forest pests that are spread through human-mediated transport to invade new habitats. In this study, spotted lanternfly and spongy moth eggs were exposed to various temperature-exposure time (35 to 70 °C and 15 to 135 min) treatments in the laboratory. Spotted lanternfly egg masses were collected from various sites in 2022 and 2023, while the spongy moth egg masses were obtained from lab-reared colonies. Heat treatments were applied using an Isotemp microbiological incubator in the spring...

Forests in cities are important social and ecological resources that vary in spatial extent, configuration, and ownership across urban areas, yet these patterns are not well described. Using high resolution urban tree canopy maps and planimetric data from three major cities of the eastern United States (New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Baltimore, MD), we distinguish patches of forest from other tree canopy types. We then compare forest patch spatial characteristics and ownership across the three cities. Baltimore has the greatest citywide forest patch cover (8.3 %) and forest patch area per...

Emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis Fairmare) is a destructive invasive insect pest of ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) in North America. Monitoring ash regeneration within post-invasion forests is essential to assess ash persistence in North America. We recorded density of overstory ash [> 10 cm diameter at breast height (DBH)], ash recruits (2–10 cm DBH), ash saplings (≥ 45 cm in height; < 2 cm DBH), and ash seedlings (< 45 cm in height), along with canopy dieback of overstory ash and recruits in four post-invasion areas in south-central Michigan, USA. We also recorded density of all other...

Climate change may transform peatlands from net carbon (C) sinks to C sources, which could result in a positive feedback to global warming. Warmer temperatures might lower water tables, increase the abundance of shrubs, slow Sphagnum and sedge growth and further accelerate the decomposition of dissolved organic matter (DOM) with a concomitant release of C from the surface. Studies in which vascular plant functional groups (PFGs) in peatlands have been manipulated to mimic the potential effects of a warming climate on DOM are scarce. In the subject study, seasonal effects of PFGs on the...

Hybridization between eastern and western lineages of the biological control agent, Leucotaraxis argenticollis (Zetterstedt) (Diptera: Chamaemyiidae), was demonstrated in the laboratory. The western lineage is abundant on hemlock woolly adelgid, Adelges tsugae Annand (Hemiptera: Adelgidae) in western North America while a genetically distinct eastern lineage feeds mostly on pine adelgids (Hemiptera: Adelgidae: Pineus spp.). Western flies have been released in eastern North America but establishment has not been observed. When reared on A. tsugae in the laboratory, many eastern L. argenticol...

Civic capacity to care for the urban environment is a key factor in urban sustainability efforts. Civic environmental stewardship groups play critical roles in solving governance challenges associated with sustainability, serving as brokers, acting as stewards, advocating for policies, and being repositories of social-ecological memory. Understanding the existing capacity of such groups to create social-ecological outcomes across the urban landscape enables better planning and implementation of equitable nature-based solutions. In this paper, we draw upon existing frameworks of community...

Using Planetscope imagery, we trained a random forest model to detect Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) throughout a diverse urban landscape in Columbia, Missouri. The random forest model had a classification accuracy of 89.78%, a recall score of 0.693, and an F1 score of 0.819. The key hyperparameters for model tuning were the cutoff and class–weight parameters. After the distribution of Callery pear was predicted throughout the landscape, we analyzed the distribution pattern of the predictions using Ripley’s K and then associated the distribution patterns with various socio-economic...