Treesearch

Early on in my master's program, I came upon the paper that set me on my scientific pathway. Having left my job as a mechanical engineer to look for work that I found more meaningful, I was drawn to the study of Acid Rain, because I wanted to play a part in addressing a serious environmental problem and also felt—perhaps because my mother was a chemist—that I really should learn more aquatic chemistry. Working as a field and lab technician in the bustling lab of Charley Driscoll at Syracuse University was a good start.

Mangrove trees of the salt secreting Avicennia germinans and the non-secreting Rhizophora mangle were investigated at the northern coast of Venezuela at a low salinity site (127 mmol kg−1) and two hypersaline sites (1600–1800 mmol kg−1). Leaf sap osmolality and mass/ area ratio of both species were positively correlated, while size was negatively correlated with soil salinity. Leaf sap osmolality was always higher in Avicennia and exceeded soil solution osmolality. Salinity increased the concentration of 1D-1-O-methyl-muco-inositol (OMMI) in Rhizophora and glycinebetaine in Avicennia. The...

Periodical cicadas are enigmatic organisms: broods spanning large spatial ranges consist of developmentally synchronized populations of 3–4 sympatric species that emerge as adults every 13 or 17 years. Only one brood typically occupies any single location, with well-defined boundaries separating distinct broods. The cause of such synchronous development remains uncertain, but it is known that synchronous emergence of large numbers of adults in a single year satiates predators, allowing a substantial fraction of emerging adults to survive long enough to reproduce. Competition among nymphs...

Un mejor manejo de las áreas protegidas requiere que los tomadores de decisiones, mantengan el estatus de manejo de las mismas, por lo que especies de interés deben ser monitoreadas. Para esto se situaron trampas cámaras e lo largo del río Santa Maura en la Reserva Natural Datanlí-El Diablo, en un gradiente de distancia hacia la carretera. Se determinó la presencia de 24 especies de vertebrados, de los cuales 10 fueron aves y 14 mamíferos, del total se determinó que el 14% eran de interés cinegético. Las especies con mayor abundancia relativa incluyeron especies generalistas principalmente,...

A variety of commercial instruments are available for sampling and quantifying microscopic airborne organisms from the environment. Although most samplers are highly sensitive, they are also expensive, costing thousands of dollars per unit, a price that is out of reach for many researchers, especially those looking to design experiments with replication. While looking at options to monitor pine stands for the presence of Fusarium circinatum, the causal agent of pitch canker disease, on multiple sites with several units per site, we developed a simple, low-cost spore trap that allows...

Wildland fire is the dominant disturbance agent of the boreal forest of Alaska. Currently, about 80% of the population of Alaska resides in communities potentially at risk from wildland fire. The wildland fire threat to these settlements is increasing because of increased suburban construction in or near forested areas. The primary objective of this research was to assess the effectiveness of maturing treatment projects in terms of previously defined risk reduction and fire behavior objectives in order to better understand the contribution of fuel treatments to the broader economics of...

Tree wounds are caused by a wide range of natural events and anthropogenic activities and occur in tree crowns, on branches, on the bole, or on roots. Existing information mostly relates to bole wounds as they are more visible, accessible, and considered more economically important.

Prescribed fire is a tool used to regenerate and sustain mixed-oak forests in the central Appalachian region. Two specific applications for prescribed fire are site preparation and the reduction of oak competition after the first removal cut in a shelterwood. This latter use is called the shelterwood-burn method. However, prescribed fire presents additional mortality risk to the stand’s overstory trees. In a shelterwood-burn study on the Fernow Experimental Forest in West Virginia, three individual tree factors—species, crown class, and dbh— and three stand manipulation treatments were...

Understanding biodiversity-productivity relationships (BPRs) is of theoretical importance, and has important management implications. Most work on BPRs has focused on simple and/or experimentally assembled communities, and it is unclear how these observed BPRs can be extended to complex natural forest ecosystems. Using data from over 115,000 forest plots across the contiguous United States, we show that the bivariate BPRs are positive in dry climates and hump-shaped in mesic climates. When considering other site characteristics, BPRs change to neutral in dry climates and remain hump-shaped...