Treesearch

Around the world, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are affecting tree populations and changing forest communities. More widespread and severe in recent decades, these diseases harm native plant populations and the health of commercially available plants used in landscaping, agriculture, and forestry. One of the more extreme examples is chestnut blight, which killed most of the American chestnut trees in North America between 1900 and 1950.

Besides the importance of internal quality, the textural quality properties of the product have a remarkable effect on consumer satisfaction and market price. Mainly, the three-dimensional (3D) modeling technique is applied to evaluate the quality of agricultural products. This study aimed to employ the structure from motion (SFM) method along with the particle film technique to predict the physical features of tomatoes. Reconstructing 3D models of tomatoes is challenging due to their shiny skin. In this study, a new method based on particle films was developed to address this issue. Fifty...

Background: Ecosystem management, community restoration, and managing for climate resilience have become major priorities of land management in recent decades. For woodlands and savannas (i.e., “open forests”), this transition has meant moving fire-deprived, closed-canopy forests to structures and compositions characteristic of natural communities that are rare today: open-grown, wide-spreading trees, and endemic flora and fauna associated with frequent, low to moderate intensity fires. Open forest restoration is complex; its approach and operational prescriptions are dependent on a...

Artificial intelligence-based large language models (LLMs) have the potential to substantially improve the efficiency and scale of ecological research, but their propensity for delivering incorrect information raises significant concern about their usefulness in their current state. Here, we formally test how quickly and accurately an LLM performs in comparison to a human reviewer when tasked with extracting various types of ecological data from the scientific literature. We found the LLM was able to extract relevant data over 50 times faster than the reviewer and had very high accuracy...

Climate change is expected to alter many aspects of forest ecosystems. Among these changes, tree species ranges are projected to shift northward and upslope in response to warming temperatures and altered precipitation patterns. Unfortunately, natural seed dispersal and plant migration rates dramatically lag behind the pace of climate change.

The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, implements the Nation’s only comprehensive inventory of forest resources across all ownerships. Through its continuous forest monitoring, FIA provides strategic- level information necessary to evaluate the status and changing trends in forest resources and the sustainability of forest management practices; FIA data serve as the foundation for a broad array of scientific studies. These proceedings report findings from invited and contributed presentations and posters from the 15th biennial...

Red pine (Pinus resinosa Ait.) ecosystems of the western Great Lakes region of United States and Canada are the focus of this chapter. These forests are found in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in the United States, and portions of southern Ontario, Canada. Historically, because of high economic value of red pine, this ecosystem has been managed using a timber-focused silvicultural system in both plantations and natural-origin stands, generally based on even-aged regeneration systems followed by planting of red pine. The timber-focused model results in composition and structure...

Elements of ecological silviculture have been in existence for over a century [l], yet many of the principles and applications did not emerge broadly until the 1990s (e.g. [2]), with particular emphasis on Douglas-fir-dominated forests of the Pacific Northwest [3]. The chapters in this book highlight how far this silvicultural model has evolved over the past several decades, both in geographic extent and the diversity of forest ecosystems and management contexts for which natural models have been applied. In contrast to generic mischaracterizations of ecological silviculture as solely...

Climate change is bringing rapid changes to the environment, including new temperature ranges and precipitation regimes. Some trees may no longer thrive and regenerate in their current locations, which in turn may reduce the ecosystem goods and services they have produced in the past.

Urbanisation, as a global driver of change, modifies the natural environment with well-known consequences to biological communities. Under natural conditions, vegetation drives soil processes in concert with the soil microbial community in their rhizosphere. It remains unclear whether and how vegetation influences these communities in heavily disturbed urban systems where many ecosystem services are also strictly linked to soils and their biota. Here, we used amplicon sequencing and GeoChip arrays to study soil microbiota responses to urbanisation and tree functional types across climatic...