Treesearch

Ice storms might sound fascinating, but for forests, they are not as cool as they seem! Ice storms happen when freezing rain coats trees, branches, and the forest floor in a shiny, frozen glaze. These storms can be a big deal because they can affect our forests and the things we care about, like, wood, wildlife, and places for recreation. Despite this, we do not know very much about how ice storms affect forests. Scientists at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, New Hampshire (USA), decided to learn more. They used fire-fighting pumps and hoses to create experimental ice storms in the...

Trees in cities perform important environmental functions: they produce oxygen, filter pollutants, provide habitat for wildlife, mitigate stormwater runoff, and reduce the effects of climate change, especially in terms of lowering temperatures and converting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into stored carbon. Generally, to increase the environmental benefits of urban forests, the number of trees is increased, directly influencing the canopy coverage. However, little is known about potential of modifying the species composition of urban tree communities in order to increase ecological...

During their stationary, non-breeding period, Nearctic-Neotropical migratory songbirds using habitats within agricultural working landscapes may be affected by both immediate site conditions as well as those of the surrounding landscape. We evaluated whether body condition and apparent non-breeding survival of Wilson’s Warblers (Cardellina pusilla) and body condition of Wood Thrushes (Hylocichla mustelina) were influenced by site and landscape contexts during two non-breeding seasons in a coffee growing region in Honduras. At the site scale, we tested whether the coffee farm management...

Turtle populations are declining globally, yet limited attention has been directed toward understanding the conservation status of species perceived to be widespread and common. The goal of this study was to contribute to the understanding of the conservation status of the eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina), a wide-ranging terrestrial generalist, in the northeastern United States (Maine to Virginia) by (1) characterizing relationships between occurrence and anthropogenic land use and (2) estimating the extent of land-use driven habitat impairment for the region. We used a regional...

Introduction: Native bee communities of temperate forests are conventionally sampled from the understory, yet there is growing evidence that bee assemblages in forest canopies are distinct from those in the understory. Therefore, conventional approaches to quantify forest bee–habitat relationships may not comprehensively characterize forest bee communities. Methods: To examine this, we sampled bees 1–26 m from ground level at 5-m increments at 47 locations in forests located in western Massachusetts, USA. We evaluated bee abundance and species richness responses to a suite of environmental...

Minimum stand densities necessary to achieve crown closure is an important aspect of stocking assessment that merits more attention. Managers concerned with optimizing individual-tree and stand-level responses will benefit from improved guidance on minimum densities when designing intermediate silvicultural treatments. To do so we generated a dataset of crown projection areas using previously published crown width models and considered various assumptions about crown packing and the spatial arrangement of stems. Implied stem densities based on predicted crown sizes were used to determine...

Peatlands are abundant across the boreal‐Arctic landscape and are important sources of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The amount of methane emitted into the atmosphere depends on multiple factors including the organic material being decomposed and the microbial processes (“pathways”) that produce methane. The different pathways of methane production leave distinct fingerprints (“stable carbon isotopes”) on methane that provide information on how that methane was formed and help to trace methane in the atmosphere back to its ground source. We looked at how stable carbon isotopes change...

Urban forest inventories are conducted to obtain important information regarding trees and the ecosystem services they provide in the urban environment. This information is derived from a sample of ground plots within which all trees are measured. It is common that some of the selected sample plots are unable to be measured, primarily due to lack of permission to access privately owned lands. At a minimum, nonresponse results in decreased sample sizes and eroded confidence in information derived from the inventory. Further, concern is raised regarding sample bias and its associated effects...

Given global urbanization trends, where approximately 68% of the global population will reside in cities by 2050 (estimates by United Nations, 2018), the most common direct human experience of forests will occur in cities. Urban landcover is expected to increase by 40% in the coming decades (Chen et al., 2020), and as such, urbanization is a global driver of change to forest ecosystems outside of cities. Between 1990 and 2020, the area of land occupied by trees in urban settings increased by 7.45 million hectares (as reported by 36 countries, Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2020)....

Extreme wildfire is an increasing threat to lives, property, and ecosystems across the United States and many parts of the world. Family forest owners (FFOs) own a large percentage of forestland in the United States, and actions and behaviors on their forestland have a large impact on wildfire prevention and mitigation across the landscape. Using data from the USDA Forest Service’s 2018 National Woodland Owner Survey, we investigated national and regional FFO wildfire attitudes and behaviors. We see that concern for wildfire is relatively high across the United States; however, this...