Treesearch

Ecocultural restoration involves the reciprocal repair of ecosystems and revitalization of cultural practices to enhance their mutual resilience to natural and anthropogenic disturbances and climate change stressors. Resilient ecocultural systems are adapted to retain structure and function in the face of disturbances that remain within historical ranges of severity. To assist in ecocultural restoration and management, understanding how a system has historically responded to different types of disturbances is therefore invaluable in understanding how social-ecological resilience can be...

Non-native ungulates (sheep, goats, and pigs) have significant negative impacts on ecosystem biodiversity, structure, and biogeochemical function throughout the Pacific Islands. Elevated nitrogen (N) availability associated with ungulate disturbance has been shown to promote the success of resource-exploitive invasive plants. While ungulate removal is a common restoration intervention, evaluations of its efficacy typically focus on vegetation responses, rather than underlying nutrient cycling. We used multiple chronosequences of ungulate exclusion (10–24 years duration) in three Hawaiian...

Past research on barriers to the development and implementation of green infrastructure (GI) has examined the experiences of policy makers and community leaders, with a focus on planting or installing GI. However, many of these programs rely on participation from the public — especially residents — who often steward GI over the long-term on both public and private lands. To better understand the barriers experienced by primary stewards of GI, we conducted 93 intercept interviews with residents spanning four neighborhoods in the City of Philadelphia and in four nearby suburban municipalities...

Street trees are highly visible components of the urban forest, providing ecosystem services to city residents, but tree mortality can result in a loss of these essential benefits. Here, we focus on how street tree survival in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (US) has been influenced by 1) tree traits and attributes, 2) the local biophysical environment, and 3) socioeconomic context. We used a longitudinal monitoring approach with a 6-year time interval and 103 randomly-located, fixed-length permanent plots, containing a range of tree size classes, to assess street tree survival rates, predictors...

The combined effects of Indigenous fire stewardship and lightning ignitions shaped historical fire regimes, landscape patterns, and available resources in many ecosystems globally. The resulting fire regimes created complex fire–vegetation dynamics that were further influenced by biophysical setting, disturbance history, and climate. While there is increasing recognition of Indigenous fire stewardship among western scientists and managers, the extent and purpose of cultural burning is generally absent from the landscape–fire modeling literature and our understanding of ecosystem processes...

Monitoring the status of nitrogen (N) deposition is a prerequisite for evaluating its ecological and environmental impacts. This chapter reviews the monitoring strategies to measure N deposition to forest ecosystems in six different regions (Europe, North America, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Central and South America). The current status of monitoring is at very different stages for these regions, ranging from sophisticated and coordinated monitoring networks devoted to the quantification of fluxes to both forested and non-forested sites to sparse intensive studies with variations in...

The emerging field of convivial conservation (CC) draws on the tradition of political ecology (PE) to present a “radical” alternative to contemporary environmentalisms, speaking to the challenges of conservation in the Anthropocene as well as the global ascent of reactionary populism. Building on previous work arguing for the ongoing value of dialogue between PE and the American West, I here develop a conversation between CC and another radical intervention, the collaborative conservation of the West’s so-called “radical center” (RC). Using the nexus of wolf–livestock conflict and public...

Outbreaks of European spruce bark beetle, Ips typographus, often follow storms, and can result in losses of Norway spruce, Picea abies, that largely exceed those caused by storms alone. Management actions to reduce P. abieslosses attributed to I. typographusmainly consist of salvage and sanitation logging of windthrown P. abies, which are sometimes limited by logistic capacities and constraints. Recent outbreaks across Europe have destroyed large areas of P. abiesforests, and are expected to further intensify as a consequence of climate change, so that additional tools are needed for...

Spruce beetle, Dendroctonus rufipennis(Kirby) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), is the most destructive pest of mature spruce (Picea) in western North America. Recent outbreaks in Alaska and other western US states highlight the need for tools to protect Piceafrom D. rufipennis. The primary antiaggregation pheromone of D. rufipennis(3-methylcyclohex-2-en-1-one, MCH) and various combinations of potential repellents (1-octen-3-ol, exo-brevicomin, endo-brevicomin, ipsdienol, ipsenol, limonene, and verbenone) were tested for their ability to disrupt the response of D. rufipennisto attractant-baited...

Ecological forestry experiments typicaly use large treatment units and silvicultural prescriptions that commonly increase within-unit heterogeneity in structural complexity and species composition in large treatment units. Increased heterogeneity influences processes affecting tree responses (e.g., competition) that operate at the neighborhood-level, posing challenges to analysis and interpretation. To investigate whether examining within-unit heterogeneity offers a more meaningful evaluation of project success than comparing categorical treatment effects, we used 20-year data from the...