Treesearch

Climate change, environmental degradation, and limited resources are motivations for sustainable forest management. Forests, the most abundant renewable resource on earth, used to make a wide variety of forest-based products for human consumption. To provide a scientifc measure of a product’s sustainability and environmental performance, the life cycle assessment (LCA) method is used. This article provides a comprehensive review of environmental performances of forest-based products including traditional building products, emerging (mass-timber) building products and nanomaterials using...

The Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) has guided the management of 17 federal forests in the US Pacific Northwest for the past 25 years. The existing management plans for these national forests – which were amended by the NWFP – are now being evaluated for revision under the US Forest Service’s 2012 planning rule. To help inform federal land managers, we reviewed the scientific literature published since the inception of the NWFP and report several key findings: (1) conservation of at-risk species within national forests is challenging in the face of threats that are beyond the control of...

Fundamental thermal properties of fresh leaves that are essential to CFD modeling of leaf pyrolysis and flammability are related to leaf composition and moisture content. The focus of this paper is on measuring and providing functional relationships for the heat of combustion, specific heat capacity, and heat of moisture desorption for fresh leaves as they vary with moisture content and composition. With the leaves typically being within a fraction of a millimeter thick and having internal structures of petiole, veins, and blades filled with active living moisture and organic compositions...

Ilopango volcano (El Salvador) erupted violently during the Maya Classic Period (250e900 CE) in a densely-populated and intensively-cultivated region of the southern Maya realm, causing regional abandonment of an area covering more than 20,000 km2. However, neither the regional nor global impacts of the Tierra Blanca Joven (TBJ) eruption in Mesoamerica have been well appraised due to limitations in available volcanological, chronological, and archaeological observations. Here we present new evidence of the age, magnitude and sulfur release of the TBJ eruption, establishing it as one of the...

Rangelands comprise a large component of the terrestrial land surface and provide critical ecosystem services, but they are degrading rapidly. Long-term rangeland monitoring with detailed, nonsubjective, quantitative observations can be expensive and difficult to maintain over time. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide an alternative means to gather unbiased and consistent datasets with similar details to field-based monitoring data. Comparing summer 2017 UAV images with long-term plot measurements, we demonstrate that rangeland vegetation cover changes can be accurately quantified and...

African American forest landowners in the southern United States (US) are typically considered a homogenous group in current studies. Our research challenges this assumption by identifying four distinct forest management outlooks among African American forest landowners using Q Method. Sustainable Harvesters focus on balanced land use with a long-term outlook; Back 40ers appreciate the presence of forests on their property but focus on alternative land use; Land Use Pragmatists are also interested in alternative land use and primarily view forest as an economic resource; Recreationalists...

The Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention Program (SFLR) was launched in 2012 to increase adoption of sustainable forestry practices among African American landowners in the southeastern United States to prevent land loss, increase forest health, and build economic assets. One of its main goals was to build communication networks through which African American landowners could obtain and share information about forestry practices and landowner assistance programs independent of public agencies. To measure and examine the growth of these communication networks over a...

Coastal estuaries in the northern Gulf of Mexico are important habitat for wading birds, but are threatened by land use and ecological changes. Conservation has been demonstrated to be more effective when stakeholders are included in the decision-making process. Public Participation Geographic Information Systems (PPGIS) facilitates the inclusion of stakeholder preferences in the planning process by allowing a direct spatial comparison with other ecological data. In this study, we used a PPGIS survey of residents of two counties on Alabama's Gulf Coast to identify wading bird conservation...

Big-game hunting is a popular recreation activity on public and private land. No study in the forest economics literature has examined hunting demand by comparing price response and value across different land-ownership classes. By combining travel cost modeling with data collected from a mail survey of licensed big-game hunters, this study estimated and compared the economic value of hunting trips across land ownership types in Georgia, USA. Results indicated that hunting-trip demand was influenced by age, income, retirement status, experience, and the presence of food plots with price...

Rainfall interception and other hydrologic processes affected by the forest litter layer are usually related to litter characteristics and rainfall conditions, with limited studies that consider the influence of slope. To simulate the hydrological functions of the litter layer at different slope gradients, artificial rainfall experiments were conducted at four rainfall intensities (from 30 to 120 mm hr−1) in horizontal and inclined trays (with the slope of 0°, 10°, 20° and 30°) with litter of Pinus tabuliformis or Quercus variabilis. The results indicated that (1) the dynamic process of...