Treesearch

This study evaluated the potential of an acid hydrotropic process at low temperatures for on-farm valorization of wheat straw by producing ligocellulosic nanofibrils (LCNFs), lignin nanoparticles (LNPs), and furfural. p-Toluenesulfonic acid (p-TsOH) was used to fractionate wheat straw under a range of conditions below 90 °C at low to moderate concentrations, between 15 and 60 wt %, for up to 2 h. p-TsOH fractionated wheat straw into a cellulose-rich waterinsoluble solid (WIS) fraction and a spent liquor stream that contained dissolved lignin and xylan. Various degrees of delignification...

High competitive ability has often been invoked as a key determinant of invasion success and ecological impacts of non-native plants. Yet our understanding of the strategies that non-natives use to gain competitive dominance remains limited. Particularly, it remains unknown whether the two non-mutually exclusive competitive strategies, neighbour suppression and neighbour tolerance, are equally important for the competitive advantage of non-native plants. Here, we analyse data from 192 peer-reviewed studies on pairwise plant competition within a Bayesian multilevel meta-analytic framework...

Stable property rights and the assurance that those rights will be protected, or disputed through due process, are essential for sustainable forest management, particularly for those who depend on forests for sustenance or income. With mounting pressures to convert forests to more profitable uses, such as agriculture or urban development, innovative ownership and tenure mechanisms have evolved to protect forest land in its natural state or managed condition. These mechanisms include the purchase and reservation of development rights, through payments for environmental services, or through...

Nonnative invasive herbivores can create complex biotic interactions by differentially feeding on native and nonnative invasive plant species. The herbivores may act as enemies of nonnative plants and prevent them from becoming invasive, or they may facilitate invasion by having a greater negative impact on native plants compared with nonnative plants. It is also possible that within the same ecosystem nonnative herbivores could either facilitate or inhibit invasion under different abiotic or biotic conditions. In this study we experimentally investigated how abiotic (soil nutrients) and...

One of many ecosystem services essential to land management is carbon regulation, but presence of invasive species can influence carbon (C) in undesirable ways. Here we discuss early results of C accumulation from the Liko Nā Pilina hybrid wet forest restoration experiment. The focus of our project is to deliberately increase C storage through a functional trait-based approach to restoration. By choosing plant species mixes with specific functional trait values, a novel ecosystem can be assembled that supports desired ecosystem services such as C regulation. We designed species mixtures...

Existing research suggests that adoption or development of various wildfire management strategies may differ across communities. However, there have been few attempts to design diverse strategies for local populations to better “live with fire.” This article extends an existing approach by articulating how characteristic patterns of local social context might be used to generate a range of fire adaptation “pathways” that can be applied variably across communities. Each ‘pathway’ would specify a distinct combination of actions, potential policies and incentives that best reflect the social...

Introduction: The Aspen-FACE experiment was an 11-year study of the effect of elevated CO2 and ozone (alone and in combination) on the growth of model aspen communities (pure aspen, aspen-birch, and aspen-maple) in the field in northern Wisconsin, USA. Uncertainty remains about how these short-term plotlevel responses might play out over broader temporal and spatial scales where climate change, competition, succession, and disturbances interact with tree-level responses. In this study, we used a new physiologybased approach (PnET-Succession v3.1) within the forest landscape model LANDIS-II...

American chestnut (Castanea dentata) was once an important component forests in the central Appalachians (USA), but it was functionally extirpated nearly a century ago. Attempts are underway to reintroduce blight‐resistant chestnut to its former range, but it is uncertain how current forest composition, climate, and atmospheric changes and disturbance regimes will interact to determine future forest dynamics and ecosystem services. The combination of novel environmental conditions (e.g. climate change), a reintroduced tree species and new disturbance regimes (e.g. exotic insect pests, fire...

This Species Review summarizes the fire effects information and relevant ecology of kingcup cactus in North America that was available in the scientific literature as of 2018. Kingcup cactus is a small cactus native to the American Southwest. It typically grows in rocky crevices in shrublands and conifer woodlands, and fingers into desert grasslands at low elevations. Its stems occur singly or in mounds up to 4 feet in diameter. Only limited information was available on regeneration and successional patterns of kingcup cactus. Hummingbirds and bees pollinate the flowers, and ants may...

Confirming presence and distribution of a species is necessary for effective conservation. However, obtaining robust occupancy estimates and confidently identifying factors important to occupancy may be difficult for rare and elusive species. Further, in surveys to assess presence, false-positive detections bias results; however, false-positive occupancy models can resolve this bias and, thus, better support conservation. We assessed the performance of false-positive versus standard occupancy models and important factors predicting presence for a low-density bat population in the southern...