Treesearch

Due to the recent encouragement for loggers to integrate tracked processors into their conventional harvest equipment regime in the Southeastern United States, this study aimed to provide loggers with an estimate of the additional productivity and operating costs that could be incurred. Since tracked processors have rarely been operated in this region, a comparison study was conducted to determine differences in productivity and operating costs between a less experienced operator versus a more experienced operator. The study indicated the less experienced operator was able to produce 67...

To successfully reproduce, conifers must have impeccable timing—opening their female cones to receive pollen from the male cones of nearby trees. This timing is a response to temperature and other environmental cues. It is to the tree’s advantage to flower when risk of damaging frost is low, but early enough in the spring to take full advantage of the growing season.Douglas-fir is ecologically important and the cornerstone of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest. Seed orchard managers carefully breed different populations of the species to produce seedlings that will thrive in...

Wildland fires in the contiguous United States (CONUS) have increased in size and severity, but much remains unclear about the impact of fire size and burn severity on water supplies used for drinking, irrigation, industry, and hydropower. While some have investigated large-scale fire patterns, long-term effects on runoff, and the simultaneous effect of fire and climate trends on surface water yield, no studies account for all these factors and their interactions at the same time. In this report, we present critical new information for the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management...

Population growth and climate change will combine to pose substantial challenges for water management in the United States. Projections of water supply and demand over the 21st century show that in the absence of further adaptation efforts, serious water shortages are likely in some regions. Continued improvements in water use efficiency are likely but will be insufficient to avoid future shortages. Some adaptation measures that have been effective in the past, most importantly large additions to reservoir storage, have little promise. Other major adaptations commonly used in the past,...

Trees provide ecosystem services such as air pollutant removal, carbon storage and sequestration, urban heat island reduction, stormwater runoff reduction as well as other socio-economic benefits. Large-scale tree plantings are occurring in many cities to increase tree canopy coverage as well as the health, economic and environmental benefits that come with trees. Thus, there is a need to assess the extent to which trees provide these ecosystem services, where services are realized, and most importantly to improve methods of determining future planting locations. Using a new spatially...

Resilience has become a common goal for science-based natural resource management, particularly in the context of changing climate and disturbance regimes. Integrating varying perspectives and definitions of resilience is a complex and often unrecognized challenge to applying resilience concepts to social-ecological systems (SESs) management. Using wildfire as an example, we develop a framework to expose and separate two important dimensions of resilience: the inherent properties that maintain structure, function, or states of an SES and the human perceptions of desirable or valued...

Climate change poses a serious threat to biodiversity and unprecedented challenges to the preservation and protection of natural landscapes. We evaluated how climate change might affect vegetation in 22 of the largest and most iconic protected area (PA) complexes across North America. We use a climate analog model to estimate how dominant vegetation types might shift under mid- (2041-2070) and late-century (2071-2100) climate according to the RCP 8.5 scenario. Maps depicting vegetation for each PA and time period are provided. Our analysis suggests that half (11 of 22) of the PAs may have...

Stream habitat restoration in the Entiat River, Washington, has increased juvenile Chinook abundance in pools with engineered logjams (ELJs); however, high spatial, temporal, and inter-species variation complicates distinguishing treatment effects between restored and unrestored habitat. Here we show that the scale of post restoration effectiveness monitoring can also be a confounding factor in such studies. In three stream reaches, we conducted snorkel surveys of (1) spatially randomized untreated habitat in which we also randomized survey area, and (2) restored (ELJ) habitat that...

Recent empirical and theoretical studies have indicated that epizootics of baculoviruses in defoliating insects may result in the termination of outbreaks starting from lower initial infection rates than previously believed. This suggests that natural epizootics can preempt the need for costly and labor-intensive pest management measures because natural epizootics reduce or end outbreaks before substantial defoliation occurs. Such cases, however, require the ability to detect small amounts of infection at the beginning of the population’s life cycle. At hatching, Douglas-fir tussock moth...

The impact of a forest canopy on smoke concentration is assessed by applying a numerical weather prediction model coupled with a Lagrangian particle dispersion model to two low-intensity wildland (prescribed) fires in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. A comparison with observations indicates that the coupled numerical model can reproduce some of the observed variations in surface smoke concentrations and plume heights. Model sensitivity analyses highlight the e ect of the forest canopy on simulated meteorological conditions, smoke concentrations, and plume heights. The forest canopy decreases...