Treesearch

This resource bulletin describes the principal findings of the 2019 forest inventory of Oklahoma (conducted January 13, 2010 to July 6, 2021)—the first report on a complete, annualized inventory of central and western Oklahoma, and changes since the previous report, Oklahoma’s Forests, 2014. The survey finds nearly 12 million acres in Oklahoma are forest land, mostly in private ownership. These forest lands contain more than 5 billion trees, 10 billion cubic feet of wood, and 250 million short tons of biomass. Net change in volume was positive, with an increase of 93.9 million cubic feet.

In the United States, voluntary carbon markets have gained significant traction in recent years. However, many offset standards, protocols, and credit ratings have come under scrutiny from the public and investors for failing to produce real or sustainable carbon offsets. Additionally, communities often find themselves unprepared to advocate for forest-based carbon projects that align with their needs and interests, mainly due to a lack of information and a general distrust surrounding carbon projects. There is a pressing need to address the social, ecological, and technological barriers...

Biochar derived from woody feedstocks is typically high in carbon, low in ash, and relatively low in nutrients compared with agricultural biochar, making it especially suitable for long-term carbon storage. Current evidence indicates that key functional properties for forestry applications include biochar yield, fixed carbon, pH, nutrient content, and porosity. Across studies, there is broad agreement that these properties are shaped by both feedstock and production conditions, particularly pyrolysis temperature and residence time. Yield and fixed carbon appear to be driven mainly by...

The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) national forest inventory estimates site productivity for every forested plot. In the Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the site class is not estimated because data are not collected on site trees due to the lack of both annual growth rings and growth and yield references, so default values are assigned. We calculated site productivity values by island, forest type and major soil taxon, stand characteristics by these same strata, and explore hurricane impacts. Generally, stand density measures decreased from drier to wetter forest types, while...

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 Tennessee. 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...

Large wildfires are a dominant type of disturbance in North American forests that have caused significant environmental impacts and economic damages. A potential approach to mitigate wildfire spread risk is to segment the landscape with fuel breaks or similar areas with reduced fuel content. However, fragmenting the landscape may undermine other ecosystem services, such as the provision of wildlife migration routes. We present a mixed-integer programming fuel break planning model that minimizes wildfire hazard while protecting migration routes for an endangered wildlife species population...

The natural background contribution from grasslands and forest lands is important to consider in research and management to address the contribution of agricultural, industrial, and urban lands to water quality degradation. To our knowledge, no study has compiled and analyzed reference water quality from small reference grasslands and forests even though land use export coefficients for background water quality are assigned at that scale in decision support tools and models, total maximum daily load projects, and comparative analysis. Thus, our major objective was to summarize nitrogen...

Understanding the functional roles of species is invaluable to conservation planning and effective ecosystem management. We used stable isotope analyses to examine the functional role of two primary burrowing crayfishes from the Piedmont region of South Carolina, USA, across both roadside and field habitats. Distocambarus youngineri served as a secondary consumer in roadside and field habitats, with similar trophic positions between habitats, sex, and size. Distocambarus youngineri relied heavily on primary and secondary consumers, with invertebrates contributing up to 82% of their somatic...

For decades, body size has been regarded as one of the most important biological traits, influencing many aspects of an organism’s biology. This “master trait” correlates with features across the biological spectrum, including physiological traits such as metabolic rate, organismal traits like longevity or fecundity, and population-level characteristics including range size and extinction risk. Body size can vary with phylogeny, environmental gradients, and time.

Spongy moth or Lymantria dispar (L.) (Lepidoptera: Erebidae), formerly known as gypsy moth, is a nonnative invasive defoliator pest to the United States. Introduced accidentally to the United States in the 1860s by an amateur entomologist, spongy moth spread quickly and large-scale efforts began soon thereafter to eradicate and limit its population and distribution. The National Slow the Spread (STS) Program, piloted in 1992 and fully implemented in 2000, currently operates in 11 States and monitors a buffer zone that stretches about 100 kilometers from North Carolina to Minnesota. Current...