Treesearch

While international efforts in the development of short rotation woody crops (SRWCs) have historically focused on the production of biomass for bioenergy, biofuels, and bioproducts, research and deployment over the past decade has expanded to include broader objectives of achieving multiple ecosystem services. In particular, silvicultural prescriptions developed for SRWCs have been refined to include woody crop production systems for environmental benefits such as carbon sequestration, water quality and quantity, and soil health. In addition, current systems have been expanded beyond...

Wetlands are characterized by water at or near the soil surface for all or significant part of the year, are a source for food, fiber and water to society, and because of their position in landscapes and ecological structure help to moderate floods. They are also unique ecosystems with long-persistent flora and fauna. Because water is a driving factor for existence as a wetland, these systems are particularly vulnerable to climate change, especially as warming is accompanied by changes the quality and quantity of water moving through these systems. Because they are such diverse ecosystems,...

Blue Mountain prairie clover is widespread, though generally infrequent, over a relatively large portion of the Interior West including southeastern Washington, eastern Oregon, northern California, northwestern Nevada, and western Idaho (Barneby 1989; Scheinost et al. 2009b). It occurs in the Columbia Plateau, Blue Mountains, Snake River Plain, and in the Northern Basin and Range ecoregion (Lambert 2005).

Dalea searlsiae (A. Gray) Barneby is commonly called Searls’ prairie clover. This species belongs to the Fabaceae or pea or legume family, Amorpheae tribe, Kuhnistera section, and Compactae series (Barneby 1977). Searls’ prairie clover was named after Fanny Searls, a 19-yearold botanist who first collected the species in 1871 in southeastern Nevada (Tiehm cited in Belofsky et al. 2014).

Data describing aircraft position and attitude are essential to computing return positions from ranging data collected during airborne laser scanning (ALS) campaigns. However, these data are often excluded from the products delivered to the client and their recovery after the contract is complete can require negotiations with the data provider, may involve additional costs, or even be infeasible. This paper presents a rigorous, fully automated, novel method for recovering aircraft positions using only the point cloud. The study used ALS data from five acquisitions in the US Pacific...

Severe wildfires often have dramatic short-term effects on water quality, although there is increasing evidence that in some catchments their effects can persist for many years. Forest recovery after the 2002 Hayman Fire burned catchments that supply drinking water to over a half million users in Denver, CO, has been extremely slow and has caused persistent water quality concerns. To evaluate whether postfire water quality changes increase the potential to form undesirable by-products of water disinfection, we compared stream water from eight burned catchments within the Hayman Fire and...

Long-term research studies are critical to understanding soil productivity and the sustainability of forest and woodland ecosystems around the world. They inform management decisions about best harvest techniques, soil property impacts and recovery, anthropogenic stressors (e.g., forest management, acid rain, climate change), and the influence if governmental policies, guidelines, and regulations. Forest ecosystems represent a major source of drinking water in much of the world making the interaction of atmospheric chemistry, vegetation, land use, soil and water one of global importance....

Integrated landscape management of key population areas along with the corridors linking them is important for tiger conservation in the Indian subcontinent. Relationships between gene flow and landscape patterns, however, cannot be generalized given that different limiting factors influence movement in different spatial contexts. Here, we study the landscape features affecting tiger gene flow in the Western Ghats, and examine how and why limiting landscape features differ between Central India and the Western Ghats. We also assess whether these landscape features have been altered by land...

A thinning study was established in 1967 in moist mixed forests on the Priest River Experimental Forest in northern Idaho, USA. The study design included three thinning intensities: low, moderate, and high intensity (1,976, 988, and 494 trees ha-1). This study examined short-term (11 years) and long-term (50 years) thinning effects on residual stand characteristics, growth, and yield. Since regeneration may occur after thinning, understory change was also addressed. Thinning decreased stand density immediately but improved the growth of residual trees. Shade-tolerant species were favored...

Bark beetles are responsible for large numbers of dead trees in ponderosa pine forests in the United States. The relationship between tree mortality caused by bark beetles and increasingly severe wildfires has been analysed by Carolyn Sieg and colleagues using a detailed physics-based fire behaviour model. The team seeks to understand if fires that follow beetles are more severe, that is if they leave less green foliage, or if the tiny beetles could have more complex interactions with subsequent wildfires than previously understood.