Treesearch

The Great Plains Grassland Summit: Challenges and Opportunities from North to South was held April 10-11, 2018 in Denver, Colorado to provide syntheses of information about key grassland topics of interest in the Great Plains; networking and learning channels for managers, researchers, and stakeholders; and working sessions for sharing ideas about challenges and future research and management opportunities. The summit was convened to better understand stressors and resource demands throughout the Great Plains and how to manage them, and to discuss methods for improved collaboration among...

Local land managers are tasked with balancing the needs and preferences of local and national publics. This report provides a snapshot of preferences for local public land management and the demographics of communities within 50 miles of U.S. national forests and grasslands in the Northern Region of the U.S. Forest Service. This information is important for managers because understanding the preferences of different user groups is essential as they seek to manage for multiple uses and balance distinct interests. This information can be used to: (a) inform project and forest planning, (b)...

Many passive sampling devices exist for sampling aquatic and semiaquatic turtles, such as basking traps, fyke nets, hoop nets, trammel nets, and modified crab traps (Lagler 1943; Vogt 1980; Chandler et al. 2017). Hoop nets are one of the most commonly used sampling devices because they are lightweight, portable, require only one worker to assemble and deploy, and provide easily quantifiable results (Davis 1982; Dodd 2016). Hoop nets are typically baited, with canned sardines being the most common type of bait used to attract turtles (e.g., Ernst 1965; Voorhees et al. 1991; Brown et al....

White-nose syndrome (WNS), an epizootic disease caused by an invasive fungus, threatens bat populations across North America. WNS-induced changes in summer bat populations could impact functional diversity. We assessed the shift in relative abundance within an assemblage of bats in a temperate southern Appalachian forest in North Carolina and Tennessee from 2009 through 2016. We used mixed linear effects models to identify bat species significantly impacted by WNS and those showing resistance, and to determine effects on reproductive rates for WNS-affected species. Four once-common species...

Prescribed burning has become more common for the management of eastern forests in North America, so understanding if and how foraging bats respond to structural changes generated by fire is of increasing importance. Our objective was to investigate the effects of post-fire landscape conditions on the occurrence of foraging bats in mixed forests of the Cumberland Plateau physiographic region. We deployed Anabat II bat detectors in 164 paired burned and unburned forest sites for ≥2 nights from mid-May through August 2014 and 2015 to monitor bat foraging and commuting habitat use. We conducted...

Objectives - Determine whether patients who live in greener and more walkable neighbourhoods live longer, and take fewer opioids, following hip or knee arthroplasty. Design - Retrospective cohort study. Setting - Residential environment following surgery at one of 54 New Zealand hospitals. Participants - All people who received a total hip or knee arthroplasty at a publicly-funded hospital in New Zealand in 2006 and 2007 (7449 hip arthroplasties and 6558 knee arthroplasties). Primary and secondary outcome measure - Time to all-cause mortality and number of postsurgical opioid prescriptions....

Salt marsh habitats support a diverse array of estuarine species but are vulnerable to increased inundation resulting from sea-level rise. In order to characterize relationships between vegetation and elevation and inform assessments of risk to salt marsh communities from projected sea-level rise, we collected vegetation and elevation data at 42 salt marsh sites in Coos Bay Estuary, Oregon. For 1-m2 plots along transects from the bayside edge to the upland, we recorded height and percent cover of all plant species present. We determined plot location and elevation at 1-m intervals with a...

Tree harvest and climate change can interact to have synergistic effects on tree species distribution changes. However, few studies have investigated the interactive effects of tree harvest and climate change on tree species distributions. We assessed the interactive effects of tree harvest and climate change on the distribution of 29 dominant tree species at 270 m resolution in the southern United States, while accounting for species demography, competition, urban growth and natural fire. We simulated tree species distribution changes to year 2100 using a coupled forest dynamic model...

What's ahead for wood products manufacturers involved in construction-based sectors and what investments have companies planned to improve their capabilities in the current business environment? To gain perspective, construction-based markets continued their growth trends in 2018, as U.S. spending on multi-family housing increased for an eighth consecutive year, while spending on new single family housing and nonresidential construction both increased for a seventh straight year, and spending on repair and remodeling increased for the sixth consecutive time, according to the U.S. Census...

The classification, mapping, and description of ecosystems are fundamental components of land management. The National Hierarchical Framework of Ecological Units (Cleland et al. 1997) provides the basis for the USDA Forest Service to accomplish these tasks. This framework allows the recognition of ecosystems or ecological units at eight spatial scales within a nested hierarchy. The highest levels of ecological units have been delineated nationally from domains through subsections. Our project, described here, is an extension of this national effort and concentrates on the local mapping and...