Treesearch

Caribbean islands encompass diverse forest ecosystems which provide valuable ecosystem services to their inhabitants. Currently, researchers rely on global generic or broad regional models or default values to predict tree species growth rates, which, in some cases, have been developed in temperate forests. The ability to understand the factors influencing the growth rates of Caribbean forest ecosystems, including both native and non-native species, has implications for projecting changes in and managing these forests under climate change scenarios. The objective of this study was to...

Originally, forest sustainability was primarily concerned with continual timber production. Contemporary concepts such as sustainable forest management (SFM) and climate-smart forestry (CSF) emphasize the continual production of multiple forest goods and services, both market and non-market. In addition to the creation of new programs for CSF, recent legislation in the United States (US) has expanded the use of incentive programs traditionally used for subsidizing SFM to also support management activities that aid in climate adaptation and mitigation. Understanding landowner perceptions of...

Whether specialist pests can cause more damage to their host plants than generalist pests is a critical issue in both basic biology and nonnative species management. To date, there is no consensus on how we define “specialist vs. generalist” pests and how we should assess forest damage or impacts (volume loss vs. mortality). Here, we comparatively investigate whether nonnative generalist pests may cause more damage to US forests than nonnative specialist pests using two frameworks: (1) the “binary or dichotomous approach” through a largely arbitrary classification of specialist and...

Forests contribute to the nutritional and medicinal needs of billions of people worldwide. In the United States, the extent and impacts of provisioning forest foods are not fittingly understood. This study seeks to elucidate the scope and scale of forest food harvest. Using publicly available data, hunting surveys and proprietary data from the Wild Harvest Initiative®, we provide estimates of the amount of foods and medicines from wild-harvested flora and fauna, and meat produced from domesticated livestock grazed on public forest lands. The evidence strongly supports the assertion that...

Increased frequency and intensity of storms, sea level rise, and warming temperatures are affecting forests along the eastern coast of the United States. However, we lack a clear understanding of how the structure of coastal forests is being altered by climate change drivers. Here, we used data from the Forest Inventory and Analysis program of the US Forest Service to examine structure and biomass change in forests along the mid-Atlantic, Southeastern, and Gulf coasts of the US. We selected plots that have been resampled at low (5 m) and mid (30–50 m) elevations in coastal areas of states...

Catastrophic earthquakes induce significant, enduring vegetation disturbances through extensive landslides and geomorphological alterations. The post-earthquake vegetation recovery hinges on the disturbance severity, climatic variability, and strategic human intervention, yet understanding of these critical processes and their influences on eco-hydrological functions at the landscape level remains limited. This study aims to quantify the earthquake's impacts on vegetation structure and eco-hydrological functions and to elucidate the recovery mechanisms driven by climate variability and...

This report in support of the Southern Forest Outlook assesses current and future risks associated with wildfire and smoke in the Southern United States, through a synthesis of literature review and new analysis. Key questions concern wildfire risk management and resilience-building efforts in the face of a changing climate, risks to forest ecosystem services, the potentially disproportionate impacts of fire and smoke on socioeconomically vulnerable populations, and how the growing wildland-urban interface, changes in fire regimes, and changes in safe prescribed burning conditions are...

Terrestrial vegetation is a crucial component of Earth’s biosphere, regulating global carbon and water cycles and contributing to human welfare. Despite an overall greening trend, terrestrial vegetation exhibits a significant inter-annual variability. The mechanisms driving this variability, particularly those related to climatic and anthropogenic factors, remain poorly understood, which hampers our ability to project the long-term sustainability of ecosystem services. Here, by leveraging diverse remote sensing measurements, we pinpointed 2020 as a historic landmark, registering as the...

Intense precipitation events pose growing threats to forest infrastructure causing flooding, and soil erosion and deposition, creating bottlenecks at road-stream crossing structures (RSCS). We describe a hillslope-scale ensemble hydro-geomorphological vulnerability assessment integrating geospatial Streambank Erosion Vulnerability Assessment (SBEVA), Modified Revised Soil Loss Equation (MRUSLE), and process-based Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model into an ensemble hydro-geomorphologic vulnerability index (EHVI) for USDA Forest Service (USFS) managed 194 road-culverts at the...

What is an old-growth forest? How can it be recognized? And how should old growth be managed? Even after decades of research and thoughtful considerations, these are not easy questions to answer. To aid in this effort, we conducted a search for available literature pertaining to old-growth forests, including historical and current information on its characteristics, scientific articles, dissertations, books, newspaper articles, government reports, and historical photographs of old growth in the Southeastern United States. This search resulted in an annotated compilation of citations...