Treesearch

Purpose of Review Forests play an essential role in conserving pollinating insects and supporting pollination services in mixed-use landscapes and are particularly important to species that require resources restricted to forests. However, some forests provide higher quality habitat for these organisms than others. The primary objectives of this article are to 1) review how pollinator communities are influenced by changes in forest structure, composition, and age, 2) explore how these patterns differ between conifer and broadleaf forests, and 3) provide recommendations for managers...

Mangroves’ ability to store carbon (C) has long been recognized, but little is known about whether planted mangroves can store C as efficiently as naturally established (i.e., intact) stands and in which time frame. Through Bayesian logistic models compiled from 40 years of data and built from 684 planted mangrove stands worldwide, we found that biomass C stock culminated at 71 to 73% to that of intact stands ~20 years after planting. Furthermore, prioritizing mixed-species planting including Rhizophoraspp. would maximize C accumulation within the biomass compared to monospecific planting....

Strawberry guava (waiawī, Psidium cattleyanumSabine, Myrtaceae) is a small tree invasive on oceanic islands where it may alter forest ecosystem processes and community structure. To better understand the dynamics of its invasion in Hawaiian rainforests in anticipation of the release of a biocontrol agent, we measured growth and abundance of vertical stems ≥0.5 cm DBH for 16 years (2005–2020) in Metrosideros-Cibotiumrainforest on windward Hawai'i Island. Specifically, we compared the growth and abundance of both shoots (originating from seed or from the root mat) and sprouts (originating...

Reliable estimates of population trends are important for prioritizing and implementing wildlife management actions. Abundance estimates are the most informative metric of population status but are difficult and costly to achieve for rare or elusive species. For bat species that are highly mobile and nocturnal, abundance estimates are usually only possible at their roosts. Although they are relatively easy to census in individual roosts, it is often unclear whether observed trends are representative of broader populations trends. Dual-frame sampling is useful for monitoring wildlife...

The California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis) is an older-forest associated species that resides at the center of forest management planning in the Sierra Nevada and Southern California, USA, which are experiencing increasingly large and severe wildfires and drought-related tree mortality. We leveraged advances in passive acoustic survey technologies to develop an acoustically assisted survey design that could increase the efficiency and effectiveness of project-level surveys for spotted owls, allowing surveys to be completed in a single year instead of in multiple years. We...

1. There are concerns over the effects of increasingly large and high-severity fires that burn outside the local natural range of variation on ecosystem services and biodiversity. 2. Pollinators provide important ecosystem services in the dry forests of the western United States where they depend on open habitat created or maintained by frequent, low- to moderate-severity fire. 3. We investigated the impact of burn severity on pollinator diversity in upland forest and meadow habitat at local (i.e., at the plot scale) and regional (burn severity class) spatial scales in the Sierra Nevada of...

As wildfires worsen across the globe, there is increased attention on the inequitable distribution of the risks to people. Pre-existing risks and vulnerabilities compound the risk to many populations. Those who bear the worst of these risks are usually underserved and ethnic/racial minority communities.

Across many upland environments, soils are thin and plant roots extend into fractured and weathered bedrock where moisture and nutrients can be obtained. Root water extraction from unsaturated weathered bedrock is widespread and, in many environments, can explain gradients in vegetation community composition, transpiration, and plant sensitivity to climate. Despite increasing recognition of its importance, the “rock moisture” reservoir is rarely incorporated into vegetation and Earth system models. Here, we address this weakness in a widely used dynamic global vegetation model (DGVM;...

Cities worldwide are grappling with complex urban environmental injustices. While environmental justice as a concept has gained prominence in both academia and policy, operationalizing and implementing environmental justice principles and norms remains underexplored. Notably, less attention has been given to centering the perspectives and experiences of community-based actors operating at the grassroots level, who can inform and strengthen urban environmental justice practice. Through ethnographic, participant-as-observer methods, interviews, and geovisualizations, this study explores the...

A large share of the land in the United States is public. Public and government access to these lands have major implications for their management and recreational use as well as surrounding privately owned lands. Because of historical policies related to the distribution of public land, the government manages countless areas of inaccessible land that are commonly referred to as “stranded public lands.” This stranded public land has been shown to decrease county-level property values and has resulted in a higher risk of wildfire. However, past studies have focused on county-level informatio...