Treesearch

Accurate estimation of mangrove biomass is a key component of the blue carbon economy, and allometric equations are a cornerstone of methodological approaches to quantify carbon from plot to landscape scales. A perennial question facing investigators is whether global allometric equations can be applied to their region of interest, or whether trees need to be harvested to provide accurate local estimates. Further, it is not always clear which combinations of tree measurements provide the most accurate estimates. We examined 16 different allometric equations for four tree measurements...

Drought is a natural part of the Southeastern United States climate and a threat to agricultural productivity and profitability. Whether slow developing or rapid onset, droughts can have negative effects on agricultural crops and livestock, depending on timing, severity, and length. Droughts are expected to become increasingly common in the Southeast due to increasing temperatures, longer dry periods between rain events, and growing water demand across the region. To help producers remain resilient and productive in the face of this threat, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)...

Fruit crop-size estimates are little better than indices unless tied to plant abundance. We developed a “standardized fruit crop” (SFC) using 11 years of fruit-density data in replicated transects to estimate long-term average (versus within-year) production by Vaccinium spp. (blueberry), Gaylussacia spp. (huckleberry), and Rubus spp. (blackberry) if applied to shrub-area inventories. We sampled blueberry and huckleberry in mature forest where canopy cover and shrub area were constant, and blackberry—a “pioneer” shrub—in shelterwood harvests where light availability decreased with stand...

This report describes the framework of a long-term project on the Santee Experimental Forest comparing hydrological processes and vegetation dynamics between two research watersheds: one formerly dominated by loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) and currently being restored to longleaf pine (P. palustris), and the other an unmanaged mixed pine-hardwood reference watershed. Along with descriptions of the watersheds and the silvicultural methods used in the longleaf pine restoration, this report provides baseline data on overstory conditions, soils, leaf area index, and coarse woody debris across the...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in South Carolina. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining...

Fire modeling is a key prescribed fire planning tool, but there are limited operational tools for integrating models of forest change and fire behavior.We sought to integrate a forest succession model, LANDIS-II, with a fire behavior model, QUIC-Fire, into a workflow for assessing fire behavior in projected future fuel conditions.Using aboveground biomass, we matched LANDIS-II data to cohorts of trees in Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data by predicting tree age using Random Forest modeling. We then used tree attributes from FIA to create three-dimensional QUIC-Fire inputs representing...

Energy exchange in the fire environment is highly influenced by the heterogeneous and dynamic coupling between the atmosphere, fire, and fuels. While it has long been known that radiation and convection are the dominant heat transfer mechanisms in wildfire spread, much is unknown about their relative contribution. This is largely due to significant challenges observing these processes in the extreme wildfire environment. We describe a low cost, easy to deploy, simple heat transfer sensor and associated model, which was developed to measure heat transfer in wildfire. The sensor consists of...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Arkansas. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining all...

Old-growth forests in the Southeast are diverse, highly valued, and complicated to both define and differentiate on the landscape. In this report, we review the history of forests in the region, including how old-growth has been defined, the characteristics of old-growth communities and old trees, and the values that old-growth communities provide. We also provide information for land managers to consider: threats that old-growth forests face, examples of management strategies for maintaining and restoring ecological functions, and tools for managing old-growth characteristics in mature...

Wildfire simultaneously disrupts ecosystem carbon, water, and soil processes, yet these coupled effects and postfire recovery trajectories cannot be reliably assessed from spectral vegetation indices alone. Here, we developed a fine-scale, multi-dimensional framework to quantify wildfire impacts and post-fire ecohydrological recovery, using the 2016 megafire in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the eastern United States as a testbed. This framework integrated gap-filled 30 m NASA Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 surface reflectance with an expanded diagnostic ecosystem model (Coupled...