Treesearch

Forest ecosystems are subject to recurring fires as one of their most significant disturbances. Accurate mapping of burn severity is crucial for post-fire land management and vegetation regeneration monitoring. Remote-sensing-based monitoring of burn severity faces new challenges when forests experience both fire and non-fire disturbances, which may change the biophysical and biochemical properties of trees in similar ways. In this study, we develop a Disturbance Weighting Analysis Model (DWAM) for accurately mapping burn severity in a forest landscape that is jointly affected by wildfire...

The Society of American Foresters Allegheny Section Summer 2017 training session was a celebration of a remarkably productive partnership. Beginning in the late 1960s, possibly at an Allegheny Section Society of American Foresters meeting, forest and natural resource managers in northwestern Pennsylvania worked with the USDA Forest Service to support and collaborate on a rigorous and challenging research agenda. The partnership began because the region was experiencing a crisis in natural regeneration, and over the decades it expanded to include several other lines of science. Many of...

My task today is to tell you a little about the early years of SILVAH and some of the events that led to its development. The computer program we call SILVAH was preceded by many years of research into four main factors that affect the outcomes of silvicultural treatments in Allegheny hardwood forests. 1) The role of well-developed advance reproduction for ensuring regeneration success. 2) The impacts of protracted browsing by white-tailed deer. 3) Effects of interfering plants such as ferns and understory beech on regenerationsurvival and development. 4) Better ways to assess stand...

This chapter highlights patterns that have sustained a half century of science-management cooperation by summarizing the ways the community of practice functioned to support and benefit from seven lines of science during the last 50 years. Each demonstrates some or all of the common themes and patterns, and we use the icons from Figure 1 throughout the paper to draw attention to specific examples of mutual benefits.

Multisource forest inventory methods were developed to improve the precision of national forest inventory estimates. These methods rely on the combination of inventory data and auxiliary information correlated with forest attributes of interest. As these methods have been predominantly tested over coniferous forests, the present study used this approach for heterogeneous and complex deciduous forests in the center of France. The auxiliary data considered included a forest type map, Landsat 8 spectral bands and derived vegetation indexes, and 3D variables derived from photogrammetric canopy...

Plant pathogenic as well as saprotrophic Phytophthora species are now known to inhabit forest streams and other surface waters. How they survive and function in aquatic ecosystems, however, remains largely uninvestigated. Phytophthora ramorum, an invasive pathogen in California forests, regularly occurs in forest streams, where it can colonize green leaves shed in the stream but is quickly and largely succeeded by saprotrophically competent clade 6 Phytophthora species, such as Phytophthora gonapodyides. We investigated, using controlled environment experiments, whether leaf litter...

The boreal tree line is in many places expected to advance upwards into the mountains due to climate change. This study aimed to develop a general method for estimation of vegetation height change in general, and change in tree height more specifically, for small geographical domains utilizing bi-temporal airborne laser scanner (ALS) data. The domains subject to estimation may subsequently be used to monitor vegetation and tree height change with detailed temporal and geographical resolutions. A method was developed with particular focus on statistically rigorous estimators of uncertainty...

Sustainable forest management requires a broad range of well-trained practitioners, scientists, educators, extensionists, and other professionals across multiple disciplines working in government, academia, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector. Forest sustainability benefits from education, technology transfer, and other programs and services, as well as from sufficient and sound infrastructure—buildings, roads, utilities, communications, etc., for the protection, production, and delivery of forest goods and services. This indicator provides information on the capacity of...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from Southeast Asia peatlands are contributing substantially to global anthropogenic emissions to the atmosphere. Peatland emissions associated with land-use change, and fires are closely related to changes in the water table level. Remote sensing is a powerful tool that is potentially useful for estimating peat CO2 emissions over large spatial and temporal scales.We related ground measurements of total soil respiration and water table depth collected over 19 months in an Indonesian peatland to remotely sensed gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE)...

The focus of this study is to (i) understand the effect of the fiber type and content on the mechanical properties of sheetmolding compounds composites and (ii) investigate possible lightweight alternatives to glass fibers-sheet molding compound composites. Glass fiber and basalt fibers are used to make sheet-molding compound composites and the mechanical performance are determined as a function of the fiber type and content. In addition, cellulose nanocrystals are used to enhance the properties of the sheet-molding compound resin system. The possibility of lightweighting the basalt...