Treesearch

Wood is a versatile and sustainable building material but may be vulnerable to fungal decay and insect damage when used outdoors or otherwise subjected to moisture. Pressure treatment with wood preservatives is the most common method of protecting wood from biological deterioration. This publication summarizes characteristics of pressure-treating preservatives and provides guidance for selection of pressure-treated wood for specific applications. It also discusses construction practices, service life expectations, and environmental considerations. The intended audience for this publication...

Pathogens and insect pests are important drivers of tree mortality and forest dynamics, but global change has rapidly altered or intensifed their impacts. Predictive understanding of changing disease and outbreak occurrence has been limited by two factors: (a) tree mortality and morbidity are emergent phenomena determined by interactions between plant hosts, biotic agents (insects or pathogens), and the environment; and (b) disparate global change drivers co-occur, obscuring net impacts on each of these components. To expand our understanding of changing forest diseases, declines, and...

Human-altered disturbance regimes and changing climatic conditions can reduce seed availability and suitable microsites, limiting seedling regeneration in recovering forest systems. Thus, resprouting plants, which can persist in situ, are expected to expand in dominance in many disturbance-prone forests. However, resprouters may also be challenged by changing regimes, and the mechanisms determining facultative seedling recruitment by resprouting species, which will determine both the future spread and current persistence of these populations, are poorly understood. In the resprouter-dominat...

Long-term research on gauged watersheds within the USDA Forest Service’s Experimental Forest and Range (EFR) network has contributed substantially to our understanding of relationships among forests, water, and hydrologic processes and watershed management, yet there is only limited information from coastal forests. This article summarizes key findings from hydrology and water-quality studies based on long-term monitoring on first-, second-, and third-order watersheds on the Santee Experimental Forest, which are a part of the headwaters of the east branch of the Cooper River that drains...

While studies have suggested that climate change adaptation will require dynamic sets of knowledge types—scientific, technical, local, and tacit—about complex, interconnected problems across spatial and temporal scales, less attention has been directed to how these different ways of knowing might be used to transform specific urban knowledge systems that are currently in place, to align with diverse societal needs, and to open new pathways for designing how cities sense, anticipate, adapt to, and learn from extreme weather events. This special issue on knowledge systems for urban resilience...

Computer vision systems for wood identifcation have the potential to empower both producer and consumer countries to combat illegal logging if they can be deployed effectively in the feld. In this work, carried out as part of an active international partnership with the support of UNIDO, we constructed and curated a feld-relevant image data set to train a classifer for wood identifcation of 15 commercial Ghanaian woods using the XyloTron system. We tested model performance in the laboratory, and then collected real-world feld performance data across multiple sites using multiple XyloTron...

In this paper, the behavior of an acoustic wave within an idealized wood specimen are compared and contrasted to the acoustic behavior observed in clear wood and lumber using signal processing and analysis. Published information on the physical and mechanical properties of clear, defect-free wood is used to derive a model of acoustic wave behavior. The model closely matches results observed from defect-free wood. Wave behavior is also examined in a series of wood specimens containing strength reducing defects such as knots and slope of grain. Differences between the idealized model results...