Treesearch

Purpose. Nutrient and sediment pollution of surface waters remains a critical challenge for improving water quality. This study takes a user-friendly field-scale tool and assesses its ability to model at both the field and watershed scale within the Fox River Watershed (FRW), Wisconsin, USA, along with assessing how targeted vegetation implementation could attenuate nutrient and sediment exports. Methods. To assess potential load reductions, the nutrient tracking tool (NTT) was used with a scoring system to identify areas where vegetation mitigation could be implemented within three...

Red spruce (Picea rubens Sarg.) was a prized timber species in West Virginia during the era of resource exploitation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. As a result, central Appalachian red spruce comprise a much smaller component of high-elevation stand composition and a greatly constricted presence across the region. Widespread restoration efforts are underway to re-establish red spruce across this landscape. However, without benchmarks to gauge growth rates and stand developmental patterns, it is unclear whether these efforts are successful. Our goal was to develop reference curves...

Invasive forest pests can affect the composition and physical structure of forest canopies that may facilitate invasion by non-native plants. However, it remains unclear whether this process is generalizable across invasive plant species at broad spatial scales, and how other landscape characteristics may simultaneously facilitate non-native plant invasion. Here, we assembled a dataset of over 3000 repeatedly measured forest plots and quantified the impact of emerald ash borer (EAB, Agrilus planipennis) residence time, land cover, and forest structure on the accumulation and coverage of...

Biological invasions are frequently and closely associated with armed conflict. As a key element of human history, war involves the invasion of (often distant) enemy territories, during which time species can be translocated, intentionally or unintentionally. Large-scale conflicts such as World War I and II, in which thousands of soldiers and supplies (including foodstuffs) were transported within and between continents, resulted in the spread of non-native taxa. However, smaller scale military actions may also involve rapid movements of troops between geographical areas, potentially...

Diseases caused by invasive pathogens are an increasing threat to forest health, and early and accurate disease detection is essential for timely and precision forest management. The recent technological advancements in spectral imaging and artificial intelligence have opened up new possibilities for plant disease detection in both crops and trees. In this study, Dutch elm disease (DED; caused by Ophiostoma novo-ulmi,) and American elm (Ulmus americana) was used as example pathosystem to evaluate the accuracy of two in-house developed high-precision portable hyper- and multi-spectral leaf...

Climate change and technological advances are reshaping ecosystems and societies. Strategic choices that were best yesterday may be sub-optimal tomorrow; and environmental conditions that were once taken for granted may soon cease to exist. In dynamic settings, how people choose behavioral strategies has important consequences for environmental dynamics. Economic and evolutionary theories make similar predictions for strategic behavior in a static environment, even though one approach assumes perfect rationality and the other assumes no cognition whatsoever; but predictions differ in a...

Wildfires can be devastating for social and ecological systems, but the recovery period after wildfire presents opportunities to reduce future risk through adaptation. We use a collective case study approach to systematically compare social and ecological recovery following four major fire events in Australia and the United States: the 1998 wildfires in northeastern Florida; the 2003 Cedar fire in southern California; the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, southeastern Australia; and the 2011 Bastrop fires in Texas. Fires spurred similar policy changes, with an emphasis on education...

In this study, we conducted a systematic literature review to determine the physical tree traits, site conditions, and urban forest management strategies that provide optimal stormwater runoff mitigation through the interception of precipitation or enhanced infiltration of water routed toward the ground by urban tree cover. Our review found that foliar characteristics such as high leaf area index, low hydrophobicity, low inclination angles, and high surface roughness promote rainfall retention by the canopy, as do high bark water storage capacity and a denser crown. In addition, when soil...

The Central Hardwood and Appalachian regions have large expanses of previously forested, but now degraded agricultural or pastoral lands that have been reappropriated for the growth of hardwood plantings and orchards. Although fine hardwoods such as black walnut (Juglans nigra L.) and northern red oak (Quercus rubra L.) have been used for everything from flooring to finely crafted furniture to orchards for nut production, gaps exist in our knowledge regarding the most efficient methods of growing these prized hardwoods.

Since the development of contemporary stocking techniques a century ago, the combination of climatic, atmospheric, financial, and social factors that determine forest management strategies have changed, altering aspen stand dynamics in the western Great Lakes, USA. Despite this, aspen management is still informed by 1970s management guides that are based on 1920s inventories; hence, a century exists between the data that underlie current management guidelines and current stand conditions. We hypothesized that current aspen stands may support higher stocking and height growth than nearly a...