Treesearch

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 Indiana. 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...

Urban forests face challenges from invasive species, deer herbivory, and tree mortality, creating gaps where natural regeneration fails. We tested whether fast-growing hybrid Populus and Salix genotypes could facilitate urban forest restoration in post-emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) canopy gaps. We planted six genotypes of each genus using two methods—potted trees and direct-planted cuttings across five 21 × 21-meter plots in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. We assessed initial light availability above each planted tree as canopy leaf area index (LAI). From 2021–2023, we measured...

An estimated 37% of the forestland across the United States, excluding Interior Alaska, is controlled by family forest ownerships. This paper examines trends in family forest ownerships with 4 + ha (10 + ac) based on data from the 2013, 2018, and 2023 iterations of the USDA Forest Service’s National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS). The overall profile of family forest ownerships remained relatively consistent between 2013 and 2023, but there were some significant changes. The percentage of ownerships with a primary decision-maker older than 68 years (the median age in 2023) increased from 32...

Hyperspectral imaging provides rich spectral information for plant phenotyping, yet analyzing these high-dimensional data remains challenging due to limited labeled datasets and the reliance on manually extracted features, such as vegetation indices. Here, we present LeafVAE, a variational autoencoder framework that learns spectral signatures directly from hyperspectral leaf images without manual annotation. Our model encodes leaf spectra into a compact, two-dimensional latent space where pixels cluster by spectral similarity, creating quantitative leaf descriptors from signature compositio...

Soybean gall midge, Resseliella maxima Gagné, was first described in 2019 following widespread outbreaks in soybean across the midwestern United States. Larval feeding inside stems causes lesions, lodging, and yield loss. Third instars overwinter in the soil within silken cocoons, but their cold tolerance, an important factor for survival in the temperate midwestern United States, is unknown. In 2022 and 2023, late-season soybean stems with R. maxima were collected from southwestern Minnesota. Third instars were retrieved and transferred to vials of sand, where they successfully burrowed...

Urban sustainability systems, including green, blue, and grey infrastructures and spaces, require ongoing coordination, collaboration, and comanagement in order to function. Municipal agencies often do not have the resources to maintain these systems alone and rely on a network of civic organisations and volunteers as well as job trainees, temporary employees, and welfare- to- work staff, alongside permanent public employees (Krinsky and Simonet, 2017). Civic groups, however, are more than just a labour force; they envision and shape the public realm in their own right. The majority of...

A 2021 analysis of the urban forest in Minneapolis, Minnesota reveals that this area has an estimated 1.8 million live trees across all ownerships. The most common large diameter (11.0+ inches) tree species are hackberry, American elm, silver maple, bur oak, and honeylocust. Trees in Minneapolis are estimated to be currently storing about 228,000 tons of carbon (837,000 tons of carbon dioxide [CO2]) valued at $38.9 million. In addition, it is estimated that these trees annually remove about 26,000 tons of CO2 and about 774 tons of air pollution. Minneapolis’ urban forest is estimated to...

Beech leaf disease (BLD), caused by the nematode Litylenchus crenatae ssp. mccannii (LC), poses a severe threat to American beech (Fagus grandifolia) across eastern North America. The disease causes wholesale anatomical, morphological, and physiological alterations, including symptoms such as leaf banding and bud abortion; the latter eventually leads to beech mortality, especially of younger trees. This outcome severely affects regeneration and diminishes the important ecosystem services provided by this keystone species. To advance our understanding of the disease, we hypothesized that...

Aspects of red spruce’s climatic niche and its relation to the biogeography of the species are covered in Chapter 1. Our emphasis here is on red spruce’s interaction with its biophysical environment in terms of a changing climate, what this might illuminate about the nature of its climate sensitivities, and how it may respond to future climate change. We approach this from an interdisciplinary viewpoint that integrates perspectives across biological, temporal, and spatial scales not often discussed together in the same work. We first briefly summarize key features of red spruce’s climate...

The first efforts to restore red spruce (Picea rubens) ecosystems in the central and southern Appalachians began nearly 100 years ago, following broad scale declines that resulted from industrial logging activities and associated wildfires. While many localized efforts have occurred over the last century, the scale of red spruce restoration has dramatically increased over the last two decades. In the mid-2000s, the Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative (CASRI) was formed to bring restoration partners together, followed by establishment of the Southern Appalachian Spruce...