Treesearch

Lianas, woody vines acting as structural parasites of trees, have profound effects on the composition and structure of tropical forests, impacting tree growth, mortality, and forest succession. Remote sensing could offer a powerful tool for quantifying the scale of liana infestation, provided the availability of robust detection methods. We analyze the consistency and global geographic specificity of spectral signals—reflectance across wavelengths—from liana-infested tree crowns and forest stands, examining the underlying mechanisms of these signals. We compiled a uniquely comprehensive...

Forest conversion to development threatens the ability of watersheds to provide stable and clean water supplies. Water managers are targeting forest conservation as a source water protection strategy to maintain healthy watershed function in developing areas, especially upstream of drinking water treatment facilities. Understanding the role of current forest cover in safeguarding these facilities is therefore crucial. We used the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to examine the relationship between upstream forest cover and downstream water resources under both current (2020) conditions...

Oak-dominated forests worldwide support high levels of biodiversity and provide many important ecosystem services. However, oak forest sustainability is challenged by unsuccessful recruitment of oaks into the overstory. It is debated whether relatively shade-intolerant oaks can maintain dominance under continuous cover forestry and examples of successful recruitment of oak into the overstory in mixed, uneven-aged forests are rare. This study, set in southern Sweden, investigated the effects of selective cutting on stand structure and oak recruits and how stand density, canopy openness, and...

The southern Appalachians are a “hotspot” of plant diversity. Herbaceous communities are especially rich in mesic cove hardwood forests, compared to drier upland hardwood forests.We evaluated changes in forest structure and herbaceous plant communities over 17 years in mature cove- (CHM) and upland hardwood (UHM) forests, and young 2-age cove- (CHSW) and upland hardwood (UHSW) stands created by shelterwood-with-reserves regeneration harvests (SW). Structure ofmature forests was relatively static. In contrast, reduced canopy cover after harvests initiated rapid increases in small tree stem...

Effective bird conservation planning requires consideration of year-round habitat requirements. We evaluated how bird communities differed across seasons, and between young shelterwood (SW) and unmanaged mature (M) hardwood forests over 8 years. We detected 3952 individuals of 82 bird species within transects. Total abundance, richness, and diversity were highest in summer and lowest in winter. Richness was greater in SW than M during all seasons; abundance and diversity were greater in SW during summer, fall, and spring. Community composition differed between SW and M during all seasons...

A growing recognition that uneven-aged silviculture can offer multiple benefits to forested ecosystems has encouraged some landowners in the southern region of the United States to convert even-aged pine stands into multi-aged stands. For shade-intolerant pines of the southern United States, however, few studies have examined residual tree growth following silvicultural treatments that convert even-aged stands to multi-aged stands. Understanding the growth response of residual trees to different kinds of stand conversion treatments is critical to stand development and sustainability, as...

Context Private land conservation maintains global biodiversity while securing areas for biome shifts. Conservation easements (CEs) are the dominant form in both the US and increasingly, globally. Objectives We illustrate the differences in the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED) and a fine-scale curated collection of CEs, the Granular Conservation Easement Datasets (GCED), which fills an imperative gap in the CE literature. We assessed each dataset’s utility for different research objectives. Methods The GCED represents a comprehensive baseline of the CEs placed between 1997...

Although coal extraction is an important source of income for several countries, including Colombia, there are problems associated with mining activities, especially in open-pit coal mines. One of these is the deposition of air-borne dust in areas surrounding open pit mines, the accumulation of which can result in changes to the biogeochemistry of surrounding soils, as well as potential impacts on soil organisms, which have an important role in the maintenance of soil physicochemical properties, and other functional attributes of soils. This study aimed to determine the ecotoxicological...

This study conducts a comparison of two ecosystem service models: the Water Supply Stress Index (WaSSI) and the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST). It focuses on each model’s capability to estimate annual water yield within the Croatan National Forest (CNF). The Croatan Forest, characterized as a coastal ecosystem with high biodiversity and unique water resource management challenges, provides an opportune setting to examine and compare the accuracy and efficiency of these models in predicting water yield. Utilizing field data and remote sensing, we investigat...

In the US, environmental governance has devolved from a government-led process to one that empowers participation by environmental non-governmental organizations, such as land trusts (LTs). While public participation in US public land-use planning has been largely institutionalized, LTs and their use of conservation land acquisitions (both fee-simple and conservation easements (CEs)) do not have similar public input requirements. Some scholars have questioned whether CEs are in the public interest or represent more narrow interests. To explore how LTs interact with public planning processes...