Treesearch

Urban trees and forests are widely used as biological filters to combat the airborne particulate matter (PM). Precipitation washing PM off from plants is regarded as filter cleaning, which is a key factor for recovering the function of foliar PM filtering. However, it is uncertain on how much PM can be total filtered by urban trees due to lack of understanding about how PM deposition, removal, resuspension and redeposition interact with species and rainfall variability. For this reason, we developed a study to determine foliar PM removal amount and rate of different sizes for five plant...

Margarops fuscatus (Pearly-eyed Thrasher) is the Caribbean’s premier avian supertramp. Concurrent with urban development, it continues to expand its geographical and habitat range throughout the region, especially in the Greater Antilles. Through personal research, supplemented by relevant publications, unpublished results from others’ research and casual observations, as well as checklists including Pearly-eyed Thrasher sightings submitted to Cornell University’s eBird online database, we document the species’ apparent colonization of Hispaniola. Most sightings of pioneering Pearly-eyed...

Shrubland vegetation has not received as much scientific attention in the Caribbean as forest vegetation has. However, shrublands constitute ~25% of the woody vegetation classification units in the Caribbean, and in 10 islands that we analyzed, the average cover of shrublands was 16% of the land area and 27% of the vegetation area. Caribbean vegetation is subject to strong environmental gradients, and many tree species change habit from arboreal to shrubby along those gradients. Shrublands usually occur at the extremes of edaphic and climatic gradients, which explains why many studies of...

Forests cover a vast area of the United States, 304 million ha or approximately one-third of the Nation’s land area (Smith and others 2009). These forests possess the capacity to provide a broad range of goods and services to current and future generations, to safeguard biological diversity, and to contribute to the resilience of ecosystems, societies, and economies (USDA Forest Service 2011). Their ecological roles include supplying large and consistent quantities of clean water, preventing soil erosion, and providing habitat for a broad diversity of plant and animal species. Their...

Context Ecological data often contain spatial structures that are latent indicators of ecological processes of interest. The emergence of spatial pattern analysis has advanced ecological studies by identifying spatial autocorrelation and testing its relationship to underlying processes. Spatial point pattern tests such as Ripley’s K function were designed for identifying spatial patterns, however they are not without their limitations. Objectives Recently another graphical technique, AG-curve, was proposed. This paper examines its suitability for classifying disturbance patterns in remote...

Terrestrial vegetation, as the key component of the biosphere, has a greening trend since the beginning of this century. However, how this substantial greening translated to global gross carbon sequestration or gross primary production (GPP) is not clear. Here we investigated terrestrial GPP dynamics and the respective contributions of climate change and vegetation cover change (VCC) from 2000 to 2015. We adopted a remote sensing based data‐driven model, which was calibrated based on the global eddy flux data set (FLUXNET2015) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer vegetation...

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau constitutes unique mountain ecosystems that can be used for early detection of the impacts of climate change on ecosystem functions. We use the MAPSSCENTURY 2 (MC2), a dynamic global vegetation model, to examine the potential responses of terrestrial ecosystems to climate change in the past (1961–2010) and future (2011–2080) under one medium-low warming scenario (RCP4.5) at a 1-km spatial resolution in the Upper Heihe River Basin (UHRB), northwestern China. Results showed that 21.4% of the watershed area has experienced changes in potential natural vegetation...

Euryodendron excelsum is a rare and endangered evergreen tree in South China. We conducted two experimental translocations (augmentation and conservation introduction) on this species and assessed morphological, anatomical and physiological traits of leaves after translocation. The introduction plants showed smaller specific leaf area, less developed palisade tissues, smaller palisade/spongy tissue ratio, stomata density and anthocyanin content, lower values of maximal quantum yield of PSII photochemistry, photochemical quenching coefficient, net photosynthetic rate, light-saturated net...

Southwestern white pine (Pinus strobiformis, abbr. PIST), a tree native to Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas in the U.S. Southwest (Little 1971), is threatened by a potentially lethal invasive fungal pathogen, Cronartium ribicola (white pine blister rust, abbr. WPBR) (Conklin and others 2009). Researchers detected the disease around 1990 in New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains (Hawksworth 1990), where it has since infected as much as 40 percent of the PIST population and inflicted increasing mortality (Conklin and others 2009). By 2004, WPBR was observed in PIST in New Mexico’s Gila...

African-American rural landholdings have declined precipitously over the past century, and heirs’ property is believed to be a significant factor in this decline. Over the same time period, under-participation in sustainable forest management has resulted in limited economic returns from land. The Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention Program was launched in 2012 to address these two issues through an integrated, community-based program of legal and forestry outreach and assistance. Family land has important heritage value to African-American landowners, and many want...