Treesearch

Hurricanes are increasingly frequent and intense disturbances that cause substantial economic and ecological damage to forested landscapes worldwide. Following such events, multiple stakeholders – including timberland owners, forest management organizations, logging and transportation providers, and wood-processing mills – face urgent salvage decisions under uncertain and spatially heterogeneous timber supply conditions. This study presents a scenario-based stochastic optimization framework for post-hurricane salvage logging that explicitly accounts for uncertainty in timber volume loss...

Accurately predicting water table dynamics is vital for sustaining groundwater resources, ecological functions, and anthropogenic activities. This study evaluates autoregressive model with a) prediction under sparsity assumption within model coefficients, b) allows lags present in both dependent and independent variables for estimating daily water table depth using hydroclimatic data from the USDA Forest Service Santee Experimental Forest (SC) and D1 (NC). Data from 2006–2019 (SC) and 1988–2008 (NC) were used, with predictors including soil and air temperature, precipitation, wind, and...

We employed the Multiple Indicator-Multiple Causes (MIMIC) model to explore whether the pattern of landowners’ engagement in various information sources and educational activities was influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, making it harder and unsafe to attend mass gatherings. Using data from a 2023 survey of forest landowners in the Southern United States, we found that 51% of respondents were likely to engage in communication networks and educational activi-ties over the next decade. Landowners with larger forest holdings, purchased properties, and the ownership motivation for enjoying...

Forest resources in the eastern US are located on heterogeneous landscapes with widely varying biophysical, social, and market characteristics. As such, the total inventory is rarely available for harvest within a region. Understanding the distinction between physical timber inventory and accessible inventory is crucial for conducting market analyses, developing forward-looking resource assessments, estimating the extractive (“active”) resource base, and, in general, ensuring the continued, sustainable flow of timber. To this end, we employ a mix of regression and spatial analysis to...

Detection of brown spot needle blight (BSNB) disease caused by the fungal pathogen Lecanosticta acicola (Thum.) Syd. has increased significantly at commercial loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) plantations across the southeastern United States in recent years. Historically, it has been a serious problem in longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill) during the grass stage of seedlings, when the environment is more conducive to fungal infection. However, since 2016, confirmed cases of the disease on loblolly pines have increased in several states, including AL, AR, FL, GA, LA, MS, SC, TN, and TX. We...

The flowering dogwood (Cornus florida L.) is an important understory tree native to south and east pine and deciduous forest ecosystems of the United States and Canada (Jenkins and White 2002). This tree species has important cultural values associated with its use by Native Americans in natural remedies from bark and root extracts, dyes, and arrow shafts (Little et al. 1980; King 2003), and it is a popular ornamental landscape tree planted in the southern and eastern United States. Studies have reported localized decline of dogwood populations due to the introduction of the fungus Discula...

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...

Nuisance species are typically managed using mechanical removal, biological, cultural, or chemical treatments, applied either individually or in combination. Applications of synthetic pesticides may result in significant non-target effects that reduce biodiversity or result in pesticide drift, and target organisms can rapidly develop pesticide resistance. Biological control has less physical impact on ecosystems than mechanical removal, and none of the human health concerns of synthetic pesticides, but relies on coevolved antagonists that are introduced to the invaded environments and can...

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 North 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...

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 Georgia. 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...