Treesearch

An interview with Karen Zumach, Tree Trust, St. Louis Park, Minnesota.

In 2008, an invasive insect, the Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) was discovered in Worcester, Massachusetts, the second largest city in New England. For the previous 12 to 15 years the beetles had quietly spread in the dense maple canopy in the Greendale and Burncoat neighborhoods and likely piggy-backed on firewood and vehicles to other nearby towns. Trees were weakened and the health of the urban forest compromised. The insect, a native of China, had most probably arrived in Worcester on wooden shipping pallets at the end of the last century before regulations requiring treatment of...

An interview with Rick Magder.

As the impacts of climate change continue to manifest throughout the world with greater frequency, addressing the question of how to best prepare for and recover from disasters is more crucial than ever. Evidence shows that beyond ripping through physical infrastructure and claiming lives, disasters also damage social networks and community bonds, making the impacts perceptible long after houses are rebuilt. The importance of social infrastructure in disaster planning is becoming more widely researched and considered, and it is consistently shown that communities with strong social ties...

Landscape architects are professionals who design, plan, and manage the land, and so it is a profession that is essential to defining the character of our National Forests and Grasslands. There are key points of entry and engagement where we have a chance to make a first and lasting impression for the public when they come to visit their public lands. Providing quality recreation experiences is perhaps one of the most relevant, as many people come to understand the value and meaning of their landscapes through recreational visits (Figure 1). Outdoor recreation activities occur in numerous...

Research and experience have demonstrated that environmental stewardship, including a wide variety of community greening efforts, can play a key role in helping communities recover from disasters and disturbance. These include both natural disturbances—for example, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and wildfire—and human-caused disasters, such as terrorism and other forms of violence. Moreover, we recognize that, now more than ever in the age of the Anthropocene, all disturbances are rooted in both natural and social causes. The immediate aftermath of disturbance events requires a swift...

In "Greening in the Red Zone: Disaster, Resilience, and Community Greening," Tidball and Krasny (2014a) make the case that creation of and access to green spaces promotes individual human health and community healing, especially in therapeutic contexts among those suffering traumatic events, asserting that making and being in green spaces confers resilience and recovery in social-ecological systems disrupted by violent conflict or disaster. To make this case, and to understand the broader implications of humans turning to nature in times of disaster or crisis, the authors proposed working...

Species ranges are expected to move northward with climate warming. However, species will likely encounter soil conditions that differ from their historic ranges. Black (Quercus velutina) and chestnut (Q. montana) oaks are expected to do well in climates that are hotter and drier, but it is unknown as to how they respond to soils of different geological histories. At a glaciated and nonglaciated site in northwestern Pennsylvania, we compared the growth, biomass allocation, and mycorrhizal association for black and chestnut oak seedlings at two different levels of light. On nutrient-poor,...

Surveillance programs to detect alien invasive pests seek to find them as soon as possible, but also to minimize the cost of damage from invasion. To examine the trade-offs between these objectives, we developed an economic model that allocates survey sites to minimize either the expected mitigation costs or the expected time until first detection of an invasive alien pest subject to a budget constraint on surveillance costs. We also examined strategies preferred by ambiguity-averse decision makers that minimize the expected and worst-case outcomes of each performance measure. We applied...

Dead treetops, their bare branches curving upward, stood dark against a blue sky. Only a few years before, these had been towering, vibrant ash trees, playing a vital role in riparian forest ecosystems of northwest Ohio. Then, the emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis), a shiny green beetle whose voracious maggot-like larva feeds just beneath the bark of the trees, swept through the forests leaving death and destruction in its wake. The emerald ash borer, or EAB, is native to eastern Asia. There, it has little impact on Asian ash species, which are able to mount defenses against the...