Treesearch

Contemporary forest planning has tasked managers with developing goals associated with resistance and resilience. In practice, silviculturists use forest structure and tree species composition to characterize goals and desired future conditions, write prescriptions, and monitor outcomes associated with resistance and resilience. Although rarely discussed in the exploding literature relating to forest resistance and resilience, silvicultural regeneration methods are important and underutilized tools to meet these goals. We propose alternative silvicultural systems for building resistance...

Despite the widespread use of ponderosa pine as an important hydroclimate proxy, we actually understand very little about its climate response in the Northern Rockies. Here, we analyze two new ponderosa pine chronologies to investigate how climate influences annual growth. Despite differences in precipitation amount and timing and large elevation differences (1820 m versus 1060 m), ring width at both sites was strongly driven by water availability. The mid-elevation, water-limited site responded well to previous fall precipitation whereas the wetter, high-elevation site responded to...

The American marten (martes americana) is a species that is dependent on old conifer forest at middle to high elevations and is highly sensitive to habitat loss and fragmentation in a scale dependent fashion (e.g., Hargis et al. 1999; Wasserman et al. 2012a, b), and forest management is often influenced by considerations of how management will affect extent and pattern of marten habitat. Due to their dependence on extensive, unfragmented forest landscapes and microhabitat structures associated with late successional forest (Buskirk and Ruggiero 1994; Hargis et al. 1999), American marten...

Each year wildland fires kill and injure trees on millions of forested hectares globally, affecting plant and animal biodiversity, carbon storage, hydrologic processes, and ecosystem services. The underlying mechanisms of fire-caused tree mortality remain poorly understood, however, limiting the ability to accurately predict mortality and develop robust modeling applications, especially under novel future climates. Virtually all post-fire tree mortality prediction systems are based on the same underlying empirical model described in Ryan and Reinhardt (1988 Can. J. For. Res. 18 1291-7),...

The genus Enlinia Aldrich, 1933 is recorded from French Guiana for the first time and six new species are described: E. loboptera n. sp., E. bova n. sp., E. colossicornis n. sp., E. mitarakensis n. sp., E. touroulti n. sp., and E. dalensi n. sp. A seventh unnamed species belonging to the E. armata Robinson, 1969 species group, and represented by a single female specimen, is also reported. These species were collected as part of the 2015 “Our Planet Revisited” survey in the Mitaraka Mountain area in far southwestern French Guiana. A key to the seven species known from French Guiana is provided.

In the subalpine zone of the Rocky Mountains, climate change is predicted to result in an increase in the frequency and severity of spruce beetle outbreaks. Climate change itself may affect vegetation, potentially leading to changes in species composition. The direct and indirect effects of climate and disturbances on forest composition, biomass, and dynamics open the possibility for non-linear ecosystem responses. Modeling studies allow for the study of the interaction of these effects and their impact on the forest system. University of Virginia Forest Model Enhanced (UVAFME), an...

The mountain pine beetle (MPB) (Dendroctonus ponderosae) is one of the most prevalent disturbance agents in western conifer forests. It utilizes various species of pines (Pinus spp.) as host trees. Eruptive populations can cause extensive tree mortality. Since the late 1990s, extensive outbreaks have occurred from the southern Rockies to British Columbia. In Colorado, lodgepole pine (P. contorta) forests have been the most affected. Since 1996, about 3.4 million acres of lodgepole and ponderosa pine (P. ponderosa) forests have exhibited MPB-caused tree mortality. A large portion of the...

The demand for large-scale and long-term information on tree growth is increasing rapidly as environmental change research strives to quantify and forecast the impacts of continued warming on forest ecosystems. This demand, combined with the now quasi-global availability of tree-ring observations, has inspired researchers to compile large tree-ring networks to address continental or even global-scale research questions. However, these emergent spatial objectives contrast with paleo-oriented research ideas that have guided the development of many existing records. A series of challenges...

It is widely recognized that biotic interactions may act as important mediators of species responses to climate change. However, collecting the abiotic and biotic covariates at the resolution and extent needed to reveal these interactions from species distribution models is often prohibitively expensive and labor-intensive. Here we used crowd-sourced environmental DNA sampling - the inference of species presence from genetic material in the environment - and high-resolution habitat covariates across 630 sites over an area of nearly 10,000 km2 to build an accurate species distribution model...

The new eDNAtlas website and dynamic database allows land managers, scientists and the public to access results from environmental DNA (eDNA) collected from aquatic systems throughout the United States.