Treesearch

Background: Forests are significant terrestrial biomes for carbon storage, and annual carbon accumulation of forest biomass contributes offsets affecting net greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The immediate loss of stored carbon through fire on forest lands reduces the annual offsets provided by forests. As such, the United States reporting includes annual estimates of direct fire emissions in conjunction with the overall forest stock and change estimates as a part of national greenhouse gas inventories within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Forest fire emissions...

In forestry, the tools to carry out on-the-ground management are found in the toolbox of silviculture, that is, the part of forestry that deals with the development and care of forests. This development and care can be all encompassing, including establishment, growth, composition, health, and quality of trees and stands to meet the diverse needs of society. The planned program of all these activities, spanning the entire life of a forest stand, is termed a silvicultural system. Ostensibly, such a definition for silviculture would seem to recognize most forests, outside of plantations, as...

Forest managers require climate adaptation strategies that are regionally relevant and translatable into planning processes. Adaptation frameworks, such as the resistance, resilience, transition framework, can guide the development of these strategies. However, there are limited examples of how these concepts can be operationalized with concomitant estimates of changes in forest structural complexity and diversity, which may support adaptive capacity. To address this knowledge gap, two operational-scale, replicated experiments were studied to understand how application of the resistance,...

The proportion of people living in urban areas is growing globally. Understanding how to manage urban biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ecosystem services is becoming more important. Biodiversity can increase ecosystem functioning in non-urban systems. However, few studies have reviewed the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in urban areas, which differ in species compositions, abiotic environments, food webs, and turnover rates. We reviewed evidence of biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships in urban environments and assessed factors that influence...

The Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis Motschulsky) poses a significant ecological and economic threat to forested landscapes. Based on the potential cost of uncontrolled infestations, countries in North America and Europe have adopted polices of eradication when breeding populations are found. In the absence of effective traps and remote sensing tools, eradication programs depend on the use of effort intensive visual surveys to identify and remove individual infested host trees. The risk of infestation on the landscape changes as surveys are conducted (reducing risk) and...

The adelgids (Adelgidae) are a small family of sap-feeding insects, which, together with true aphids (Aphididae) and phylloxerans (Phylloxeridae), make up the infraorder Aphidomorpha. Some adelgid species are highly destructive to forest ecosystems such as Adelges tsugae, Adelges piceae, Adelges laricis, Pineus pini, and Pineus boerneri. Despite this, there are no high-quality genomic resources for adelgids, hindering advanced genomic analyses within Adelgidae and among Aphidomorpha. Here, we used PacBio continuous long-read and Illumina RNA-sequencing to construct a high-quality draft...

The fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda (J. E. Smith) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), is a globally significant agricultural pest, causing severe damage to corn production in China. Chemical odor-based trapping is a major approach for FAW control, making it essential to understand the FAW antennal sensillum types to enhance development of effective chemical odor attractants. In this study, we comprehensively examined the antennal sensilla types of FAW, identifying eight types and two subtypes, including Böhm's bristles, sensilla trichoidea, sensilla chaetica (I and II), sensilla coeloconic...

American chestnuts (Castanea dentata) were once abundant in the eastern United States, until the non-native diseases chestnut blight fungus and ink disease devastated their numbers in the 19th and 20th centuries. By the 1950s, American chestnuts were functionally extinct, meaning that the species no longer plays a viable role in the ecosystem. Today, 10 percent of the original population remains, and most trees are small sprouts that often die young.

The National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS) is implemented by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program, and is aimed at understanding the social context of the forests of the United States by looking into the attitudes, behaviors, and general characteristics of forest landowners and their land. The surveys cover all types of private forest ownerships, but reporting of results often focuses on families, individuals, trusts, estates, and family partnerships, collectively referred to as family forest ownerships. Survey results are...

For decades, researchers at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest have monitored nitrate levels in streams to better understand nitrogen cycling in forests. Researchers have reported that peaks in stream water nitrate levels often occur within months of single disturbance events, such as clearcutting or ice storms.