Treesearch

In order to increase the pace and scale of managing forests to reduce wildfire risk in the western U.S., federal agencies have adopted policies that promote an all lands management (ALM) approach, which extends management actions across jurisdictional boundaries. To better implement such policies, ALM approaches require new governance systems that overcome barriers found in existing systems, which typically address jurisdictions separately. Polycentric governance systems, characterized by multiple and diverse actors at different scales operating in coordination with one another under an...

The American Robin (Turdus migratorius) is one of the most widespread, common bird species in North America; yet, very little is known about its migratory connectivity, migration timing, and migratory routes. Using archival GPS tags, we tracked the movements of 7 individual robins from 3 breeding populations in the United States. Four robins captured in Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska, overwintered in Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Montana, up to 4,500 km from the capture location. One robin captured in Amherst, Massachusetts, overwintered in South Carolina 1,210 km from the...

Persian walnut (Juglans regia) is cultivated worldwide for its high-quality wood and nuts, but its origin has remained mysterious because in phylogenies it occupies an unresolved position between American black walnuts and Asian butternuts. Equally unclear is the origin of the only American butternut, J. cinerea. We resequenced the whole genome of 80 individuals from 19 of the 22 species of Juglans and assembled the genome of its relatives Pterocarya stenoptera and Platycarya strobilacea. Using phylogenetic-network analysis of single-copy nuclear genes, genome-wide site pattern probabilitie...

Southwestern (SW) China is an area of active tectonism and erosion, yielding a dynamic, deeply eroded landscape that influences the genetic structure of the resident populations of plants and animals. Iron walnut (Juglans regia subsp. sigillata) is a deciduous tree species endemic to this region of China and cultivated there for its edible nuts. We sampled 36 iron walnut populations from locations throughout the species' range in SW China and genotyped a total of 765 individuals at five chloroplast DNA regions and 22 nuclear microsatellite loci. Species distribution models were produced to...

Pekania pennanti (Fisher) is a generalist mesocarnivore that has been documented to prey on a diversity of mammals, but there have been no previous documented incidents of a Fisher hunting and killing a semi-aquatic mammal. Here, we report a first-hand observation and DNA evidence of a Fisher hunting and killing an Ondatra zibethicus (Muskrat) from inside a beaver lodge along a lakeshore.

Soil erosion has been recognized as a significant environmental malady in the United States for over 200 years. Numerous attempts have been made to model and quantify the issue, yet significant issues remain that hinder the accuracy and effectiveness of such models. This manuscript describes an attempt to model soil erosion and concomitant sedimentation with the Unit Stream Power Erosion and Deposition (USPED) model at an active military training installation. The model accurately determined both soil erosion and sediment deposition on a spatial basis at 83% of 60 randomly assigned points...

Developing advanced building materials with both excellent thermal insulating and optical properties to replace common glass (thermal conductivity of ∼1 W m−1 K−1) is highly desirable for energy-efficient applications. The recent development of transparent wood suggests a promising building material with many advantages, including high optical transmittance, tunable optical haze, and excellent thermal insulation. However, previous transparent wood materials generally have a high haze (typically greater than 40%), which is a major obstacle for their practical application in the replacement...

Housing prices have generally performed better than economies in most countries in the UNECE region. Economic projections and house-price analysis can provide insights into the housing construction, sales and remodelling markets and subsequently into wood product demand. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) reported that residential housing prices increased by 1.9% globally in 2018, year-onyear, and by 2.2% in the euro area, 2.0% in the US and 1.0% in the Russian Federation. Canadian house prices retreated, however, by 0.06%. According to BIS, real residential prices (adjusted for...

Fuel reduction treatments are designed to meet multiple management objectives, resulting in unique vegetation structures that do not conform to standard classifications and vary considerably over space and time. We evaluated how different post-treatment vegetation structures relate to patterns in wildfire severity. To reconstruct both untreated and treated pre-fire forest structure, we used post-fire stand data measured at three different fuel treatment units burned by the 2011 Wallow Fire (Arizona). We describe (1) how forest structure differs among the treatment units, both in the...