Treesearch

Recurrent environmental changes often prompt animals to alter their behavior leading to predictable patterns across a range of temporal scales. The nested nature of circadian and seasonal behavior complicates tests for effects of rarer disturbance events like fire. Fire can dramatically alter plant community structure, with important knock‐on effects at higher trophic levels, but the strength and timing of fire's effects on herbivores remain unclear. We combined prescribed fire treatments with fine‐scale location data to quantify herbivore responses to fire across three temporal scales....

Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) garners international interest with increasingly taller wood structures built of robust, rigid panels. For seismic resilience of multistory platform construction, this study prototypes a CLT rocking wall system with an elliptical boundary profile. Curvilinear cuts to the load-bearing edges of a rectangular CLT panel produce smoother lateral response to earthquakes, with gravity-driven passive re-centering ability and reduced crushing damage at wall corners. Stiffness and ductility of the rocking wall can be tuned by proportioning the ellipse profile. Connections...

Kraft lignin was catalytic graphitized by iron at 1000 C in argon, hydrogen, CO2, methane, and natural gas atmospheres, respectively. The effect of atmospheric agent types on product distribution (gas, liquid, and solid carbon yields) was analyzed. The solid products were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, Raman, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, and X-ray diffraction. Experimental results have shown that the degree of graphitization of Kraft lignin depends not only on the highest temperature, but also the type of ambient gas phase during heat treatment. Methane...

The National Wilderness Preservation System in the United States provides the greatest level of protection for the ecological and social values of lands held in trust for future generations. Although designated wilderness is the cornerstone of the US conservation portfolio, designation alone doesn't assure the protection of these areas, which are degraded by threats both inside and external to the area. This paper describes new methods for quantifying the location and cumulative magnitude of threats to wilderness, allowing agency managers and the public to evaluate whether the legal...

The mechanisms that control polyamine (PA) metabolism in plant cell lines with different embryogenic potential are not well understood. This study involved the use of two Araucaria angustifolia cell lines, one of which was defined as being blocked, in that the cells were incapable of developing somatic embryos, and the other as being responsive, as the cells could generate somatic embryos. Cellular PA metabolism was modulated by using 5mM arginine (Arg) or ornithine (Orn) at two time points during cell growth. Two days after subculturing with Arg, an increase in citrulline (Cit) content...

Aspergillus flavus is a soil-borne saprophyte and an opportunistic pathogen of both humans and plants. This fungus not only causes disease in important food and feed crops such as maize, peanut, cottonseed, and tree nuts but also produces the toxic and carcinogenic secondary metabolites (SMs) known as aflatoxins. Polyamines (PAs) are ubiquitous polycations that influence normal growth, development, and stress responses in living organisms and have been shown to play a significant role in fungal pathogenesis. Biosynthesis of spermidine (Spd) is critical for cell growth as it is required for...

The development of new and improved wood adhesives is hindered by an incomplete mechanistic understanding of what makes a wood–adhesive bond able to withstand changes in moisture levels. Although common methods are established to test and report the bulk-level properties of bond lines, such as bond-line shear strength and wood failure analysis, the development of experimental tools to study wood–adhesive bond lines and the effects of moisture at the nanometer to millimeter length scales remains an active area of research. Here we introduce and briefly review four recently developed tools...

In forest ecosystems, disturbances that cause tree mortality create canopy gaps, increase growth of understory vegetation, and alter the abiotic environment. These impacts may have interacting effects on populations of ground-dwelling invertebrates that regulate ecological processes such as decomposition and nutrient cycling. A manipulative experiment was designed to decouple effects of simultaneous disturbances to the forest canopy and ground-level vegetation to understand their individual and combined impacts on ground-dwelling invertebrate communities. We quantified invertebrate...

Many temperate tree species have extraordinarily broad distributions along gradients of temperature and precipitation. But it is not clear in most species whether this reflects very broad tolerance of climate conditions, or a high degree of genetic differentiation or phenotypic acclimation in their responses to local climate. Provenance trials and common garden experiments indicate that at least some tree species of the temperate forests of eastern North America show genetic differentiation in growth as a function of climate, although these studies have been largely limited to measurements...