Treesearch

Several analyses have been done or are underway to evaluate the vulnerability of individual forest tree species to climate change. Species vulnerability assessments allow managers to allocate limited resources to the management of those species that are most threatened. But we also know that threats to individual populations of species may vary across the landscape, and that populations may contain unique and potentially valuable genetic variants that should be conserved. We propose a framework for prioritizing populations within species for gene conservation activities in which maps of...

Trees and woodlands in the United Kingdom are currently subject to a range of threats including loss and fragmentation of native woodland and escalating pest and disease outbreaks. The largely unknown impacts of climate change pose a number of questions when considering afforestation and reforestation. There are frequent calls to develop resilient woodlands, robust enough to deal with these challenges but there is uncertainty over what this means in terms of species mixes and use of local provenance versus non-local planting material. Conserving and making appropriate use of the current...

The primary aim of this article is to enhance understanding about how two commonly used PPGIS approaches—community workshops and internet surveys—differ in who they bring to the environmental planning table. A secondary aim is to expand knowledge about favored destinations and activities associated with public forest road networks, with a focus on exploring how favored destinations and activities differ for urban and rural residents. Our study contributes to the field of environmental planning and management in several ways. First, it helps fill the gap in knowledge about whether and how...

Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) is a global voice for plant conservation via its worldwide network of botanic gardens and partners. Tree conservation has been a strong focus of BGCI’s program for many years. In collaboration with Fauna & Flora International, BGCI runs the Global Trees Campaign (GTC, www.globaltrees.org), the only international program dedicated to saving the world’s threatened tree species. Through the GTC, we prioritise and protect the trees of greatest conservation concern, and improve and promote tree conservation action globally. As a foundation of...

Artificial regeneration is necessary for meeting a variety of management objectives following timber harvests and other disturbances. While foresters use ecological classification to identify the most appropriate species to plant on a particular site, they generally use seed zones to identify the most suitable seed source of that species to plant. Seed zones have been utilized by public and private sector nurseries for many years in the western United States, but have not been accepted by nurseries for the eastern United States, corresponding to 33 states defined by the National Forest...

Crop wild relatives native to the United States have proved useful as genetic resources in breeding more productive, nutritious, and resilient crops. Their utilization is expected to increase with better information about the species and improving breeding tools. But this utilization may be constrained by their limited representation in genebanks and the ongoing loss of wild populations to habitat modification, invasive species, pollution, over-collecting, and climate change. We report on a series of related initiatives contributing to conservation of crop wild relatives in the United...

Genetics and genomics are increasingly important in forestry management and conservation. Next generation sequencing can increase analytical power, but still relies on building on the structure of previously acquired data. Data standards and data sharing allow the community to maximize the analytical power of high throughput genomics data. The landscape of incomplete submissions, minimal metadata, and distributed raw data inhibits aspects of data re-use, validation, and discovery. Community databases can address these challenges for their research communities by collecting and integrating...

Water temperature drives the complex food web of a river network. Aquatic organisms hatch, feed, and reproduce in thermal niches within the tributaries and mainstem that comprise the river network. Changes in water temperature can synchronize or asynchronize the timing of their life stages throughout the year. The water temperature fluctuates over time and place, creating variability in the network’s thermal regime. Because of this variability, many important details in the thermal regime of a river network cannot be simply represented by an average temperature. New research by Ashley...

Conservation status assessments are a valuable tool for the management and protection of rare and endangered species. Categorizing and defining rarity, threats, and population trends is often the first step toward understanding and documenting the health of the world’s plant diversity. Having up to date conservation status assessments for all of North America’s native tree species, based on a globally standardized system, would enable an objective and systematic prioritization of species for future conservation action and enable stakeholders from a wide range of sectors to engage in...

Aldo Leopold once said “to keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” The USDA Forest Service has embarked on a long-term effort to do just that. Our gene conservation efforts in forest trees are a modest beginning to this urgent need. In the early 2000s, the Forest Health Protection Program and its partners in the National Forest System and Research and Development Deputy Areas of the Forest Service initiated seed collections in several five-needle pine species that were succumbing to white pine blister rust and bark beetle attacks at accelerated rates. We...