Treesearch

Long-term monitoring is essential for wildlife conservation. Most wildlife population attributes require long-term monitoring to evaluate. Over the time for attributes to resolve through monitoring, however, information needs change. Existing frameworks to accommodate information need changes, such as adaptive monitoring and management, are built for large-scale, programmatic changes. Often, smaller, rapid changes are necessary. Fortunately, information needs can change predictably in wildlife monitoring, even when little is known about populations. Predictable changes include the desire...

The Ordway-Swisher Biological Station (OSBS) is a 38-km2 reserve owned by the University of Florida and is part of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). The reserve contains several iconic Florida habitats, such as sandhill, mesic hammock, and scrubby flatwoods. While plants and animals have been extensively studied at OSBS, the fungi remain poorly known. Fungal inventories are critical to increase knowledge of both fungal diversity and species ranges, and thus to provide foundational data for a wide array of applications in ecology and resource management. Here, we present...

1. Bats are important but threatened insectivorous predators, making them a core group to consider when weighing the risks and benefits of insecticide use for combating pest outbreaks. Bats may benefit from open spaces created when insect pests defoliate tree canopies. Applying insecticides could also make treated areas less attractive to bats by lowering insect availability and increasing canopy densities. 2. Here, we examined the effects of a one-time insecticide treatment of oak forest plots with tebufenozide under outbreak and non-outbreak scenarios of the forestry pest species...

Accurate biomass estimation is essential for carbon stock assessment and coastal ecosystem management. Despite decades of research and interest in Puerto Rican mangroves, we lack species specific allometric models with only 10 Rhizophora mangleindividuals having been collected previously. To address this gap, we developed allometric equations for four mangrove species (Avicennia germinans, Laguncularia racemosa, Rhizophora mangle, and Conocarpus erectus) by harvesting and analyzing 152 individuals. Biomass estimation models were developed using standardized major axis (SMA) regression,...

Ancient archeological wooden artifacts hold important stories from our history that can only be retold through wood conservation. Understanding the detailed mechanisms of how to stabilize these fragile artifacts dimensionally is necessary to effectively preserve them for the next generations. In this study, highly effective organosilicons are used to treat and infiltrate model degraded wood. We used wood dissolution techniques, in conjunction with two-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, to characterize the changes occurring to native wood cell wall polymers before and...

Forest restoration treatments in dry conifer forests of the western United States are often done with objectives to move current forest structure toward historical conditions and, in turn, increase the system’s resilience to future wildfires. But little is known about their effects on understory plant composition, particularly over the long-term. This is especially true in the Colorado Front Range (CFR). We used a before/after control/impact study design to assess the effects of mechanical forest restoration treatments on forest structure, surface fuels and understory plant composition 1,...

New tools of synthetic biology that enable precise manipulation of genomes, metabolic pathways, and ecosystems present new opportunities, risks, ethical dilemmas, and responsibilities for stewards of biodiversity. We argue that the risks and benefits of synthetic biology for use in biodiversity conservation, which we term “synthetically assisted conservation,” can be better understood, evaluated, and regulated by precisely defining the techniques in relation to well-established and regulated conservation frameworks: conservation translocation and integrated pest management. Synthetically...

Moderate-resolution (30-m) national map products have limited capacity to represent fine-scale, heterogeneous urban forms and processes, yet improvements from incorporating higher resolution predictor data remain rare. In this study, we applied random forest models to high-resolution land cover data for 71 U.S. urban areas, moderate-resolution National Land Cover Database (NLCD) Tree Canopy Cover (TCC), and additional explanatory climatic and structural data to develop an enhanced urban TCC dataset for U.S. urban areas. With a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.747, our model estimated...

Climate change significantly affects hydrological processes in forest ecosystems, particularly in sensitive coastal areas such as the Croatan National Forest (CNF) in North Carolina. Accurate projections of future water yield are essential for managing agriculture, forestry, and natural ecosystems. This study investigates the potential impacts of climate change on water yield using a combination of statistical downscaling and machine learning. Two downscaling methods, a Statistical DownScaling Model (SDSM) and Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analogs (MACA), were evaluated, with the SDSM...

Understanding the timing of key life history events is essential for effective fish conservation and management. Traditionally, predicting hatch and emergence timing in wild fish populations was challenging due to the reliance on average incubation temperature as a primary model parameter, which is often difficult to obtain in natural settings. Recent advancements have refined these models, enabling their application in wild environments using spawning dates and daily water temperature records. However, their broader use remains constrained by a lack of parameterizations for many species,...