Treesearch

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 Florida. 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...

Global forest ecosystems face growing threats from land use change, climate and weather extremes, and insects and diseases. Managing these threats is difficult due to the time, cost, and human error associated with the quality and quantity of data required for research and assessment. While conventional analytical methods are being improved constantly, they are often slow in providing information needed to respond promptly to unprecedented changes driven by both natural and anthropogenic alterations to forest ecosystems. For this reason, potential applications of artificial intelligence...

Projecting land use transitions onto a wall-to-wall raster requires an initial basemap of land use for the projection period. The 2020 Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment includes spatial realizations of county-level land use projections; these realizations are a collection of 90-meter resolution rasters that allocate the county-level projections across the conterminous United States (CONUS). The 2020 basemap is a 90-meter raster depicting land use across the CONUS circa 2020 and is used as the starting position for the spatial realizations. The basemap was created by fusing a modified...

National Forests in the United States provide a broad range of goods and services, safeguard biological diversity, and contribute to the resilience of ecosystems, societies, and economies. Given differences in land use history and forest management approaches between National Forests and neighboring ownerships, we investigated whether they differ across a spectrum of forest health indicators, from biomass stocking to structural diversity to invasion by non-native plants. We used Nationwide Forest Inventory (NFI) plot data from within National Forest System (NFS) lands across the conterminou...

The South’s production of pulpwood decreased from 52.9 million cords in 2023 to 52.1 million cords in 2024. Roundwood production remained constant at 38.2 million cords and accounted for 73 percent of the South’s total pulpwood production. The use of wood residue decreased 5 percent to 13.9 million cords in 2024. Alabama and Georgia led the South in total production, with 9.1 and 8.7 million cords, respectively. In 2024, 66 mills were operating and drawing wood from the 13 Southern States.

Developing interest in using silviculture to achieve a broad array of objectives such as maintaining or restoring ecological function, increasing adaptive capacity, and providing timber products in the same forest stand has increased the appeal of irregular shelterwood methods. Despite growing application in Canada, Europe, and other regions of the United States, use of irregular shelterwood is limited across the Central Hardwood Forest Region, USA. Obstacles to broader implementation include a need for intermediate treatments to address existing challenges to oak regeneration, unfamiliarit...

Heavy metal contamination in water systems driven by industrialization and urbanization is a primary concern for society. The development of efficient remediation methods to reduce heavy metal contamination in water is necessary. Biochar has emerged as a promising adsorbent for heavy metals due to its unique physicochemical properties. This study investigated the effect of biochars manufactured from 12 different wood species on lead ion (Pb(II)) removal capacity in aqueous solutions. The 12 different wood species include two softwoods and 10 hardwoods. The physicochemical properties and...

Puerto Rico (PR) and the US Virgin Islands (VI), two archipelagos located in the Caribbean region, possess forest ecosystems with high species diversity, which remain largely underrepresented in forest modeling research compared to temperate forests. Accurately characterizing tree allometry is essential for monitoring forest status over time and predicting tree growth and yield in sustainable forest management. Height-diameter relationship models, denoted as H–D models, are widely used in forestry practice since they effectively reduce the time and cost of field data collection and provide...

As a forest-dependent species, the endangered Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis) is reliant on large-diameter tree roosts (hereafter, “roosts”), which are usually snags. Such large trees develop as a product of time and species-specific growth rates. To better understand the ecology of bat roost habitat, we explore the putative trade-offs between tree age, size, and growth rates on the development of roosts. Specifically, we quantify the age, size, and longevity of roosts of Indiana bats using dendrochronology at three study sites across the species’ range in the eastern USA. On average, roosts...

Myotis septentrionalis (Northern Long-eared Bat) has experienced severe population declines due to the impacts of white-nose syndrome, although some populations along the Atlantic Coast appear to be persisting. Our objectives were to document the presence of Northern Long-eared Bats across the Coastal Plain of South Carolina and describe roost characteristics and other aspects of the bats’ ecology. We captured 45 Northern Long-eared Bats from April to August 2017–2024 across 4 sites. We radio-tagged 30 bats and tracked them to 99 day roosts. Almost all (92.9%) roosts were in pines,...