Treesearch

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...

Geosystem services (GSs) and ecosystem services (ESs) are interconnected, both representing nature's contributions to people. Whether GSs are a subset of ESs depends on the definition of ESs. The answer would be “not necessarily” (i.e., some GSs are, while other GSs are not), if ESs are the benefits humans derive from ecological functions, processes, or characteristics. The boundary proposed by Chen et al. (2023) to differentiate ESs from other ecosystem-related benefits adopted this definition, and suggested that ESs are renewable and affected by biotic elements to occur. Gray et al....

The water storage capacity of the root zone can determine whether plants survive dry periods and control the partitioning of precipitation into streamflow and evapotranspiration. It is currently thought that top-down, climatic factors are the primary control on this capacity via their interaction with plant rooting adaptations. However, it remains unclear to what extent bottom-up, geologic factors can provide an additional constraint on storage capacity. Here we use a machine learning approach to identify regions with lower than climatically expected apparent storage capacity. We find that...

Objective We sought to measure a step-pool restoration project's effects on a steelhead Oncorhynchus mykisspopulation and explore the capability of process-based modeling to enhance understanding of the results. Methods We used before-after–control-impact monitoring in combination with a process-based, individual-based, spatially explicit fish population model to evaluate a stream restoration project that reconfigured the channel and primarily added step pools to a reach of a second-order stream in northwestern California. Result Five years of monitoring both before (2012–2016) and after...

The benefits and functions of urban trees are well-studied, and stewardship groups, non-governmental organizations, tree professionals, and municipal leaders aim to increase canopy cover and expand planting programs. However, urban trees also present variable risks to human safety and infrastructure based on tree species, size, age, health, and maintenance history. Furthermore, changing global climate conditions and increased storm frequency and intensity make it imperative for urban forestry professionals to mitigate risk and collaborate with stakeholders. In this qualitative study, we...

The summers of 2022 and 2023 in the northern hemisphere have demonstrated that extreme heat events are an urgent, real problem that cities must address. Among the many aspects of urban planning that relate to human thermal comfort, a major aspect that can contribute to the solution is maintaining and increasing urban tree canopy cover. However, the scientific evidence for the magnitude of cooling benefit is sparse and highly variable. In reviewing the empirical evidence on the extent to which urban trees can cool the environment, we argue that there are still significant knowledge gaps,...

Whitebark pine (WBP, Pinus albicaulis) is a white pine of subalpine regions in the Western contiguous United States and Canada. WBP has become critically threatened throughout a significant part of its natural range due to mortality from the introduced fungal pathogen white pine blister rust (WPBR, Cronartium ribicola) and additional threats from mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae), wildfire, and maladaptation due to changing climate. Vast acreages of WBP have suffered nearly complete mortality. Genomic technologies can contribute to a faster, more cost-effective approach to the...

Urban tree planting initiatives (TPIs) have become a prominent form of public work that has the potential to increase the livability and sustainability of cities. However, if not sufficiently resourced and thoughtfully planned and implemented, these high-profile programs may fail to achieve intended goals. To promote successful implementation of TPIs, we offer recommendations for the pre-planting, installation, and postplanting phases. During each of these phases we present five cross-cutting themes: ensuring adequate funding for all project phases; cultivating place-based landscape...