Treesearch

For each piece of heirs property, whether it is a home or a tract of land, there are multiple legal owners (usually descendants in a family), and no single owner can make major decisions for the property without everyone's agreement. Heirs property, which can be created with or without a will, is equivalent to having a pile of money in a glass box; a family can see their asset but cannot access its equity. For municipalities, this means that billions of dollars in valuable tax-appraised land is owned by a group of individuals where no one person has the legal authority to manage the...

This essay includes findings from "Identifying Potential Heirs' Properties in the Southeastern United States: A New GJS Methodology Utilizing Mass Appraisal Data," a report the authors co-authored with Dr. Cassandra Johnson Gaither, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Southern Research Station. That report was supported by the Forest Service as part of a cooperative agreement between the agency and the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia (15-CA-11330144-023).

To maximize utilization of our forest resources, detailed knowledge of wood property variation and the impacts this has on end-product performance is required at multiple scales (within and among trees, regionally). As many wood properties are difficult and time-consuming to measure our knowledge regarding their variation is often inadequate as is our understanding of their responses to genetic and silvicultural manipulation. The emergence of many non-destructive evaluation (NDE) methodologies offers the potential to greatly enhance our understanding of the forest resource; however, it is...

Central to the problem of biological invasions, human activities introduce species beyond their native ranges and participate in their subsequent spread. Understanding human-mediated dispersal is therefore crucial for both predicting and preventing invasions. Here, we show that decomposing human-mediated dispersal into three temporal phases: departure, transport and arrival, allows to understand how the characteristics of human activities and the biological traits of species influence each phase of the dispersal process, and ultimately govern invasion pathways in insects. Integrating these...

Plants are essential resources for the earth and human survival. Many plant species are threatened by human disturbance and are now in danger of extinction. The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) seeks to halt the continuing loss of plant diversity and species across the globe. China endorsed the GSPC in 2002, and launched a national plant conservation strategy related to the GSPC in 2008. This paper assesses the progress of GSPC implementation in China. The results show that Targets 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 of the GSPC were achieved in China before 2018, and substantial progress has...

Plant reproductive traits have often evolved to optimize plant fitness under different environmental conditions, and their relationships with vegetative functional traits reflect more general plant reproduction and resource allocation strategies. How those relationships change during succession remains unclear. Here, we investigated the relationships between 8 reproductive traits and 18 functional traits of leaves, stems and whole plants during succession of a subtropical forest. We found that most leaf traits of dominant species were associated with seed/ fruit dispersal mode and pollinati...

Heirs’ property presents obstacles to asset building because such properties have “clouded land titles,” i.e., those that are difficult or impossible to use as collateral for home mortgages. Because of these difficulties, heirs’ property owners may be more likely to purchase manufactured or mobile homes rather than site-constructed ones because mobile home financing can be accomplished with chattel loans. The purchase of a manufactured home as chattel property, when attached to real property classed as heirs’ property, intensifies housing vulnerability because manufactured home values are...

Ramps (Allium tricoccum Aiton), a wild onion, are an enduring seasonal food and symbol of cultural identity in Appalachia. Growing national interest in ramps as a culinary delicacy has raised questions about their sustainable use, although systematic documentation of their rise in popularity is lacking. We seek to augment our understanding of demand for ramps by examining changes in media coverage of the plant over time. We trace shifts in the portrayal of ramps, from a provincial novelty to a high-end food source through a thematic analysis of two popular media datasets. Our analysis of...