Treesearch

Understanding fossil fuel displacement benefits of wood energy use is essential for tracking national forest-sector sustainability metrics. Using a cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) approach, this study presents a transparent and replicable framework to estimate the avoided GHG emissions associated with wood energy use across the residential, commercial, industrial, and electric power sectors from 1949 to 2024. The results show wood energy use is estimated to have cumulatively avoided 13,545 million tonnes CO2e, and 111 to 243 million tonnes CO2e annually between 1949 and 2024,...

Increased wildfire activity in the US motivated the USDA Forest Service to update national wildfire simulation data used for risk assessment and prioritizing wildland fuel reduction programs. The update (FSim-2020 to FSim-2023) included revised data on fuels, ignition frequency, fire weather, and recalibration of the FSim model. We overlayed the new simulated fire perimeters with the most recent building footprint data to examine the change in magnitude and spatial patterns of estimated building exposure. We found that the update to FSim-2023 resulted in a 61% increase in simulated...

As drought impacts on forests intensify, evaluating the potential for adaptation is critical for predicting forest responses and the impacts of management strategies. We assessed phenotypic and genomic variation in western larch (Larix occidentalis Nutt.) populations to evaluate the potential for drought adaptation across its range. First, we established a seedling common garden experiment outside the natural range with 52 populations subjected to two drought treatments. Second, we analyzed pooled targeted exome‐sequence capture data from 44 populations of an adult provenance trial to...

Like other restricted-use pesticides, soil applied termiticides must be registered by the federal government prior to use or sale in the United States. Currently, that role is handled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP). Until 2010, this office was known as the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) — an acronym that still appears in historical instances.

rioritizing restoration-focused ecosystem management across large areas is challenging when multiple goals are at stake and goals vary among forest managers. This complexity is compounded when forest restoration tools including prescribed fire and silviculture have variable efficacy across landscapes and among management goals. Collaboration between scientists and resource managers to design analyses that address these complexities can clarify contingencies and tradeoffs and provide flexible decision support. White oak and shortleaf pine forests and woodlands have shown strong declines in...

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 Oklahoma. 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...

Street tree plantings are common in urban greening programs, and these trees provide important ecosystem services that increase as trees survive to maturity. Field-based monitoring to understand mortality rates and causes is valuable for urban forest management but very time-consuming.We used street-level imagery to virtually monitor survival for 2,884 street trees over several years postplanting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.We observed similar mortality rates to other studies, with 7.5% of trees dead or removed by the first summer after planting and the mortality rate...

Environmental beta attenuation monitors (EBAMs) are commonly used to measure 1-hour average particulate matter concentrations in smoke from prescribed fires and wildfires. Because relative humidity (RH) can artificially inflate particulate matter concentrations, EBAMs are equipped with an internal heater that activates when ambient RH reaches a specified setpoint. Most studies address high PM2.5 concentration conditions, where the EBAM is well documented to perform quite well on an hourly basis (R2 of 0.95). In prescribed fire applications, however, increases in PM2.5 concentrations are...

The return of gray wolves (Canis lupus) to the Northern Rocky Mountain (NRM) region of the United States since the 1990s is often hailed as a conservation success story. However, this success has not been without controversy, including the pervasive idea that the ‘wrong’ wolf was reintroduced from Canada. The claim that so-called ‘Canadian super-wolves’ are a non-native and hyper-violent subspecies is then utilized to justify violence against and lethal control of wolf populations and to stymie conservation efforts. Within the field of taxonomy, delineating between subspecies is complicated...

Jack pine budworm (JPBW), Choristoneura pinus pinus, is a major defoliator in Canada, yet remains absent from theoretical discourse on outbreak synchrony, despite sharing key life history traits with the archetypal “cross-scale” pest, spruce budworm (C. fumiferana). JPBW has primarily been studied in host-rich landscapes, raising questions about its behavior in host-sparse regions.We asked whether scale-crossing JPBW outbreaks are contingent on host density, and whether reduced outbreak incidence in host-sparse landscapes reflects synchronized or desynchronized population limitation.We...