Treesearch

The identification of Armillaria and Desarmillaria species associated with Armillaria root disease is important to determine management strategies, due to their variation in pathogenicity and virulence.

Fusarioid fungi that cause damping-off and root diseases can result in significant losses to conifer crops produced in forest nurseries across the USA. These nurseries are vital to reforestation and forest restoration efforts. Understanding the diversity of Fusarioid fungi associated with damping-off and root diseases of conifer seedlings can provide an approach for targeted management techniques to limit seedling losses and pathogen spread to novel landscapes.

Although plant-soil feedbacks (interactions between plants and soils, often mediated by soil microbes, abbreviated as PSFs) are widely known to influence patterns of plant diversity at local and landscape scales, these interactions are rarely examined in the context of important environmental factors. Resolving the roles of environmental factors is important because the environmental context may alter PSF patterns by modifying the strength or even direction of PSFs for certain species. One important environmental factor that is increasing in scale and frequency with climate change is fire,...

Lampreys are an ancient lineage of jawless fish for which the relationships among some lineages are uncertain. We addressed these information gaps for Lampetra species with a focus on western North America. Phylogenetic analysis using all publicly available sequences of two mitochondrial genes - cyt b and COI - supported designation of western North American Lampetra as a distinct genus from Lampetra in Europe, Asia, and eastern North America. Species delimitation analysis of cyt b sequences identified seven species, only three of which are currently recognized. Lampetra ayresii and L....

Climate change is warming stream temperatures with significant implications for species that require cold temperatures to persist. These species often rely on headwater habitats in mountainous regions where elevation gradients in hydroclimatic conditions may induce differential patterns of long-term warming that affect the resistance of refugia. Forecasts from mechanistic and statistical stream temperature models diverge regarding whether this elevation dependence will cause above- or below-average warming in headwaters during warm summer periods, so we examined monitoring records for...

Establishing field inventories can be labor intensive, logistically challenging and expensive. Optimizing a sample to derive accurate forest attribute predictions is a key management-level inventory objective. Traditional sampling designs involving pre-defined, interpreted strata could result in poor selection of within-strata sampling intensities, leading to inaccurate estimates of forest structural variables. The use of airborne laser scanning (ALS) data as an applied forest inventory tool continues to improve understanding of the composition and spatial distribution of vegetation...

Accurate maps of tree species distributions are necessary for the sustainable management of forests with desired ecological functions. However, image classification methods to produce species distribution maps for supporting sustainable forest management are still lacking in the Miombo woodland ecoregion. This study used multi-date multispectral Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) imagery collected at key phenological stages (leaf maturity, transition to senescence, and leaf flushing) to classify five dominant canopy species of the wet Miombo woodlands in the Copperbelt Province of Zambia....

Throughout the world, people resettle to reduce vulnerability to potentially dangerous wildlife, including elephants. In turn, they may become subject to development policies and practices that can either exacerbate or alleviate their vulnerability. Our ethnographic study in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, where 18,000 elephants share territory with 16,000 people, examines how resettlement decisions and settlement policies impacted vulnerability to elephants. We found that people who came into regular conflict with elephants frequently relocated from cattleposts to villages. Although...

Mechanical forest thinning treatments are implemented across the western United States (US) to improve forest health and reduce hazardous fuels. However, the main challenge in thinning operations is low financial feasibility. This study synthesized the stump-to-truck cost of forest thinning operations in the western US based on operations research articles published over the last 40 years (1980-2020). We systematically selected and reviewed 20 thinning studies to analyze key variables affecting machine productivity and harvesting costs. The average cost of forest thinning was lowest for a...

Based on current trends and policies aimed at decarbonizing energy systems, the conversion of biomass to bioenergy has the potential to grow rapidly, but such growth depends on the development of efficient, sustainable, and competitive biomass supply chains. As a result, the biomass supply chain has stimulated the interest of a diverse group of researchers across academia, government, and industry, and there is a need to synthesize and categorize the rapidly expanding literature in this field. We conducted a literature review using advanced bibliometric analysis and visualization of 1711...