Treesearch

Urban forests produce ecosystem services that can benefit city dwellers, but are especially vulnerable to climate change stressors such as heat, drought, extreme winds and pests. Tree selection is an important decision point for managers wanting to transition to a more stable and resilient urban forest structure. This study describes a five-step process to identify and evaluate the performance of promising but infrequently used tree species. The approach is illustrated for the Central Valley of California, USA and has been implemented in the Inland Empire and Southern Coastal regions of...

Information on reproduction is essential to understanding population dynamics and developing conservation plans for wildlife. However, research on reproduction with species in the Martes Complex in wild settings can be challenging due to their low population densities, elusive behaviours, and tendency to hide young in cryptic den structures such as tree cavities or snow burrows. Answering basic questions about life history parameters in the Mattes Complex involves specialized techniques that have been increasingly refined by researchers over the last half-century. We present a review of...

Many western North American forest types have experienced considerable changes in ecosystem structure, composition, and function as a result of both fire exclusion and timber harvesting. These two influences co-occurred over a large portion of dry forests, making it difficult to know the strength of either one on its own or the potential for an interaction between the two. In this study, we used contemporary remeasurements of a systematic historical forest inventory to investigate forest change in the Sierra Nevada. The historical data opportunistically spanned a significant land management...

Abiotic stresses such as drought, are the main factors for forest declines globally. There is therefore an increasing interest in understanding the mechanisms underlying tree adaptations and survival to water deprivation. Angiosperm tree species demonstrate an amazing phenotypic plasticity. They sense and respond to adverse changing environmental conditions via a series of physiological, cellular, and molecular processes which are under a tight genetic control. In this book chapter, first we present some key morphological and anatomical features adopted by angiosperm tree species to...

Forest tree genomics has made enormous strides in recent years, by describing the expression and function of genes influencing tree growth and development, and even sequencing the entire genomes of select “model” tree species. We believe that the next chapter of forest tree genomics will focus on cross-species comparative approaches, which will have the ability to provide fundamental new insights into the unique biology and evolutionary history of tree species. Angiosperm trees in particular are fascinating in light of evolution. Angiosperm trees represent the extensive genome evolution,...

Advances in genomic science have enabled comparative approaches that can evaluate the evolution of genes and mechanisms underlying phenotypic traits relevant to angiosperm forest trees. Wood formation is an excellent subject for comparative genomics, as it is an ancestral trait for angiosperms and has undergone significant modification in different angiosperm lineages. This chapter discusses some of the traits associated with wood formation, what is currently known about the genes and mechanisms regulating these traits, and how comparative evolutionary genomic studies can be undertaken to...

Immunolocalization can be used to precisely visualize the location of specific proteins, cell wall components, or any other molecules within cells or tissues for which specific antibodies are available. Here we describe an immunolocalization protocol for tissue sections of woody Populusstems. The protocol includes descriptions of the required sectioning, fixation, probing, detection, and imaging parameters, as well suggested controls useful in interpreting results.

The Philippines has lost nearly 70% of its natural mangrove cover since the early 1900s. As a result, large investments have been made to restore mangrove forests and the many ecosystem services that they provide. Most of these restoration efforts have been through outplanting of Rhizophora sp. seedlings, many of which have failed because the proper hydrological and ecological conditions were not properly assessed. Other afforestation projects involved planting seedlings in inappropriate places (e.g., seagrass beds, mudflats) that resulted in replacing one valuable ecosystem with another....

California has recently experienced one of the worst droughts on record, negatively impacting forest ecosystems across the state. As a major source of the region’s water supply, it is important to evaluate the vegetation and water balance response of these montane forested watersheds to climate variability across the range of rain- to snow-dominated precipitation regimes. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Standardized Runoff Index (SRI) were used to capture the hydrologic drought signal, and MODIS vegetation indices (i.e., the normalized difference vegetation index and the...

This article discusses four features of islands that make them places of special importance to environmental conservation. First, investment in island conservation is both urgent and cost-effective. Islands are threatened hotspots of diversity that concentrate unique cultural, biological and geophysical values, and they form the basis of the livelihoods of millions of islanders. Second, islands are paradigmatic places of human–environment relationships. Island livelihoods have a long tradition of existing within spatial, ecological and ultimately social boundaries and are still often...