Treesearch

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program collected forest and tree measurements from 37 plots among three forest communities on the islands of Rota, Saipan, and Tinian in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). A total of 36 tree species and 132 dominant vascular plant species were recorded, including 28 invasive species. Invasive plant species covered most of the forest area, and 9 of the top 20 most dominant nontree plant species were invasive. The small tree Leucaena leucocephala (tångantångan), comprising by far...

Hunting is a popular recreational pursuit that can provide social, economic, and ecological benefits. It also serves as a primary tool for managing deer and elk populations. Yet hunter behavior—how different types of hunters (elk vs deer, rifle vs archery) use landscapes and the factors that influence hunting success—is seldom quantified. Scientists at the Starkey Experimental Forest and Range collected real-time data from tracking units worn by hunters to better understand their movements as well as how deer and elk respond to their presence. They found that hunters used a small portion...

Arthropods contribute importantly to ecosystem functioning but remain understudied. This undermines the validity of conservation decisions. Modern methods are now making arthropods easier to study, since arthropods can be mass-trapped, mass-identified, and semi-mass-quantified into ‘many-row (observation), many-column (species)‘datasets, with homogeneous error, high resolution, and copious environmental-covariate information. These ‘novel community data sets’ let us efficiently generate information on arthropod species distributions, conservation values, uncertainty, and the magnitude and...

Climate warming poses challenges to native fish, particularly at high latitudes. We used incubation models to explore how interactions between spawning timing and daily varying water temperature affected emergence timing for five species of Pacific salmon in 33 thermally diverse streams in south-central Alaska. Interactions between spawning timing and stream thermal regime led to three different emergence timing responses: (1) “expanded” by typically 2–3 times the duration of the spawning window for summer spawning salmon at streams with a large annual water temperature range; (2) “equal”...

Many studies have identified an association between exposure to the natural environment and improved public-health outcomes. However, much of this observational work lacks a theoretical foundation, so we look to the humanities for a stronger basis for green-health research, examining how trees have been used as religious metaphors and symbols for health and wellbeing. In particular, the tree of life, sacred trees, and other religious symbols provide a promising theoretical basis for green-health research. Based on this review, we propose the value of incorporating attributes such as...

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had a dramatic impact on Ukrainian forestry and forest resources. In this situation, the ability of the National Forest Inventory (NFI) to update forest information at the state level is very limited due to the large territory which is inaccessible for field data collection. This study presents an approach for the combined use of different sources of field observations and remotely-sensed forest vegetation imagery to produce a time series (TS) to characterize forest conditions and changes across Ukraine. First, we created a forest...

The effects of timber harvest practices and climate change have altered forest ecosystems in southeast Alaska. However, quantification of patterns and trends in stream habitats associated with these forests is limited owing to a paucity of data available in remote watersheds. Here, we analyzed a 30-year dataset from southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to understand how these factors shape stream habitats. First, we examined differences between broad management classes (i.e., harvested and non-harvested) that have been used to guide stream channel restoration goals. Second, we...

Elevation, soil composition, and depressions can influence the distribution of water belowground and its availability to tree roots. During the summer months when precipitation levels are at their lowest, this belowground soil moisture can stave off the effects of drought stress on trees. Although lack of soil moisture is the most well-known driver of drought stress, it may not be the only driver. Working in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in western Oregon, researchers investigated whether a lack of soil moisture or warm dry air is the primary cause of the drought stress exhibited by...

Future water availability is influenced by both climate and associated vegetation dynamics. This study coupled vegetation projections from a dynamic global vegetation model (MC2) with an ecohydrological model, Water Supply Stress Index (WaSSI), to predict water yield at the 8-digit Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC8) watershed level for the conterminous United States (CONUS) for the 21st century. We considered two contrasting warming scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 and 4.5) and accounted for simulation uncertainty by using a large ensemble of climate model outputs. The coupled...

High severity fire is far outpacing post-fire reforestation capacity across the American West, highlighting the need to better understand when and where natural regeneration is sufficient to meet short- and long-term reforestation goals. The vast majority of available post-fire data represents regeneration in the first few years following a fire, raising the question of how well recovery trajectories can be predicted from early post-fire snapshots. We utilize a unique dataset from seven wildfires and 78 plots surveyed twice following stand-replacing fire in two California ecoregions, the...