Treesearch

Premise of research. Plants remain underrepresented among species with sequenced mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) because of the difficulty in assembly with short-read technology. Invasive species lag behind crops and other economically important species in this respect, resulting in a lack of tools for management and land conservation efforts. Methodology. The mitogenome of Microstegium vimineum, one of the most damaging invasive plant species in North America, was sequenced and analyzed using long-read data, providing a resource for biologists and managers. We conducted analyses of...

Context: Native early-successional plants and invasive exotic plants often colonize the same disturbed space and have similar functions, making interactions likely. Knowing whether these interactions are facilitative or competitive across different scales will help determine the influence of such species across a forested landscape. Objective: We evaluated the impacts of an early-successional, nitrogen-fixing native (facilitator), Robinia pseudoacacia, and an allelopathic invasive (inhibitor), Ailanthus altissima, on regeneration, basal area, and diversity of forests at local and regional...

Seed bank compositions provide a record of past disturbances, the legacies of which may last thousands of years. Our goal was to determine if sites defined historically by fire-related (pyrophilic) tree species have seed bank compositions different from sites defined historically by pyrophobic tree species. We selected three 80þ year-old forested sites within the Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia, to represent three pyrophilic zones based on percent-pyrophilic-witness tree cover: Low (0–10%), Medium (40–50%), and High (80–90%). Soil plugs were collected to evaluate the seed bank...

Kirtland's warblers primarily nest in northern Lower Michigan and mostly winter in the central islands of The Bahamas. They were federally delisted under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in October 2019 after 60 years of conservation and management efforts. A search was conducted for all available literature pertaining to Kirtland’s warblers, including historical and current information on conservation efforts, published scientific articles, dissertations, books, newspaper articles, unpublished agency reports and observation data, and personal correspondences pertaining to management. An...

This report presents a comprehensive history of the Hugo Sauer Nursery and the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station, Institute for Applied Ecosystem Studies located near Rhinelander, Wisconsin from 1931 to 2023. It details the evolution of the nursery, which started as a Depression-era federal nursery created to reforest the national forests in the upper Midwest, became a state-operated nursery leased by the Wisconsin Conservation Department, and transformed into an experimental testing ground for cutting-edge forestry research. The establishment of the Institute of Forest...

This report is the fourth summary of annualized inventory of Pennsylvania with field data collected from 2013 through 2019. Forest land area has decreased since 2014 to 16.6 million acres. Oak/hickory and maple/beech/birch forest-type groups dominate the forested area and large-diameter stands account for 73 percent of timberland. Net volume on timberland is 37.3 billion cubic feet but increases have slowed due to decreased gross growth and increased mortality. Net growth still outpaced harvest removals by a ratio of 2.1:1. Additional information on forest area, land-use change, fragmentati...

The Bridger-Teton National Forest (BTNF) in western Wyoming comprises over 3.4 million acres of public land. This rich and diverse landscape borders Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and includes the headwaters of the Green, Snake, and Yellowstone Rivers. Robust and diverse partnerships are needed to steward this landscape on behalf of the American public. Currently, these partnerships are not systematically tracked or available as a dataset. The Bridger-Teton Planning Team identified the following priorities for partnership planning: (a) accelerate progress toward forest planning...

Accurately modeling wildland fire behavior is crucial for both planning prescribed burns and responding to wildfires. Predicting fire behavior, however, is difficult. Fuel and atmospheric factors change and interact in complex ways across space and time, even within a single prescribed burn.

Patterns in Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) data provide perspective on how organic matter (OM) character is shaped by natural processes. Here, we reevaluate and update the molecular lability boundary (MLB) approach to assess OM lability using a synthesis of FT-ICR MS data. Now included are MLBL (biolability) indices (i.e., the OM proportion of hydrogen-to-carbon ratios ≥ 1.5) of freshwaters, plant litter and biochar leachates, soils, and oils across the US, trends in OM and dissolved OM (DOM) lability from laboratory experiments examining isolated...