Treesearch

Roads affect flora and fauna across the world. Large mammals are particularly vulnerable to road effects because their large home ranges lead to a higher probability of contact with road networks. Disturbance associated with roads can alter the probability of habitat use by making suitable habitat near roads inaccessible or underused. Many studies and monitoring programs for large mammals such as guanaco (Lama guanicoe) in South America, however, rely on counts made from roads to estimate population abundance and distribution. These counts implicitly assume that animal responses to roads...

The use of mass timber structural products in tall building applications (6–20 stories) is becoming more common around the world including North America. A potential concern is the environmental wetting of mass timber products during construction because such products may dry out more slowly than light-frame structural lumber, and wood, as an organic material, is susceptible to deterioration at elevated moisture contents. In order to better understand the moisture conditions present in high rise timber constructions, a long-term moisture monitoring program was implemented on an eight...

In their recent article in Ecology and Evolution, O’Loughlin and Green (2017) set out to (1) redefine the term secondary invasion as the condition "when invader success is contingent on other invaders altering the properties of recipient ecosystems" and (2) propose a framework for accounting for this phenomenon in invasion ecology. We applaud the second objective. However, redefining the term secondary invasion in the very narrow manner they propose is problematic and unfounded. Here, we establish that secondary invasion represents a broad range of phenomena that encompasses invader-facilit...

Biological invasions present a global problem underlain by an ecological paradox that thwarts explanation: how do some exotic species, evolutionarily naïve to their new environments, outperform locally adapted natives? We propose that community assembly theory provides a framework for addressing this question. Local community assembly rules can be defined by evaluating how native species’ traits interact with community filters to affect species abundance. Evaluation of exotic species against this benchmark indicates that exotics that follow assembly rules behave like natives, while those...

Forest residues, including unmerchantable and small-diameter trees, tops, and limbs, produced during thinning and timber harvest operations can be used to produce renewable bioenergy and bioproducts. The more efficient utilization of forest residues could also help offset the high costs of forest restoration activities, fire hazard treatments, post-harvest activities and forest management in general. Forest residues have long been underutilized and treated as waste materials because of their high collection and transportation costs as well as their low market value. While open burning is...

Human-caused carbon emissions have pushed global atmospheric CO2 concentrations from a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm to over 400 ppm which in turn is forcing the earth’s climate to change due to increased atmospheric trapping of radiant heat. Temperature and precipitation patterns are changing both temporally and physically (snow vs. rain) while intense storm and heat events are exposing forests to new extremes. These changes are directly affecting tree vitality and growth, causing global tree mortality events, as well as influencing fire behavior and burn frequency, and other abiotic...

A solvent-free route was developed to fabricate 100% biobased, renewable, and degradable polylactide (PLA) composites reinforced will ball-milled celluloses. The results show that the original pulp cellulose fibers were modified to partial amorphization through 30-min ball milling. Filling the ball-milled celluloses into PLA increased the tensile modulus for the resultant cellulose/PLA composite materials, while decreased their tensile strength and impact resistance. This method can be used to access the cost-efficient PLA-based composite materials with tunable mechanical properties. The...

This paper is a written summary of the keynote lecture presented at the 13th Annual Meeting of the Northern European Network on Wood Science and Engineering (WSE2017). The lecture summarized work performed at the Forest Products Laboratory (Madison, WI, USA) over the past 10 years related to understanding diffusion through cell walls. The highlighted work includes advances in electrical measurements and synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence microscopy. The paper also discusses how diffusion is related to many wood damage mechanisms. The ultimate goal of the presented research is to develop...

Several forest inventory techniques utilize approaches that are similar to stereological approaches often applied in microscopy and other fields. Stereology is characterized by the description and estimation of properties of objects based on samples of lower dimension than the object, e.g., 2-dimensional slices from 3-dimensional objects, 1-dimensional probes from 3-dimensional or 2-dimensional objects and dimensionless points from higher dimensional objects. The stereological character of many forest inventory methods was historically developed independently of recognition of a relationshi...

Many invasion hypotheses postulate that introducing species to novel environments allows some organisms to escape population controls within the native range to attain higher abundance in the introduced range. However, introductions may also allow inherently successful species access to new regions where they may flourish without increasing in abundance.