Treesearch

Wildfire increases the likelihood of runoff, erosion, and downstream sedimentation in many of the watersheds that supply water for Colorado’s Front Range communities. The objectives of this study were to: (1) identify rainfall intensity thresholds for a post-fire runoff or sediment delivery response at plots (≤0.06 ha), hillslopes (0.07–5.2 ha) and watersheds (100–1500 ha) after three Colorado Front Range wildfires for up to four years post-fire; (2) determine how the rainfall thresholds varied by fire location, year post-fire, spatial scale, and mulch treatments; and (3) use long-term...

Climate-driven increases in wildfires, drought conditions, and insect outbreaks are critical threats to forest carbon stores. In particular, bark beetles are important disturbance agents although their longterm interactions with future climate change are poorly understood. Droughts and the associated moisture deficit contribute to the onset of bark beetle outbreaks although outbreak extent and severity is dependent upon the density of host trees, wildfire, and forest management. Our objective was to estimate the effects of climate change and bark beetle outbreaks on ecosystem carbon...

Coleoptera are important components of forest ecosystems and can be affected by forest management schemes aimed at limiting fuel build-up. Our research objective was to determine if repeated applications of fuel reduction treatments resulted in changes in abundance or diversity of beetle (Coleoptera) families, genera, and species within upland mixed hardwood forests in the southern Appalachians Mountains, North Carolina, USA. We established three replicate blocks (∼56 ha) and split each block into four fuel reduction treatments. Treatments included prescribed burning, mechanical felling, a...

Overstory and understory treatments were established in natural oak stands and red pine plantations in Michigan in 1991 to test the hypotheses that (1) oak seedling survival and growth would be greater in pine than oak stands and (2) removal of competitors would enhance oak seedling performance. Late spring prescribed fires were implemented in 2002 and 2008 to investigate their effectiveness in controlling understory red maple. Performance of planted northern red oaks has been monitored since 1991 and the abundance of naturally regenerating oak and red maple seedlings and sprouts in different...

This article presents a new apparatus for collecting water vapor sorption isotherms in parallel with example data from acetylated and thermally modified loblolly pine. The experimental setup consists of an enclosure that is continuously flushed with a carrier gas of known RH supplied by an RH generator and a balance with precision of 0.1 mg. All samples are placed on the balance and the mass is monitored as a function of time. At a given RH, the measurements are stopped when the change in the total mass of all samples are less than or equal to a change in MC of 0.1 μg g-
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The apparent thermal conductivity of several insulation materials was measured over a range of temper- atures. A newly developed multilayer reflective insulation system called Mirrorpanel was tested against existing products. Mirrorpanel samples were prepared using layers of aluminum foil (emissivity of 0.11) and coated paper (emissivity of 0.52) separated by air spaces of approximately 5 mm, with fiberboard structural spacers. Steady-state heat flux was measured in the laboratory for 500 mm ×500 mm samples including several Mirrorpanel configurations as well as expanded polystyrene and...

Activated carbon (AC) developed and marketed for water and gas purification is traditionally made from hard coals (fossil-based materials). However, increasing awareness of environmental impacts caused by fossil fuel consumption and fossil-based products has provided a market opportunity for renewable and low-impact biobased products as alternatives including AC. The huge volumes of woody biomass generated from forest management activities could be used as feedstocks for these new bioproducts. These new bioproducts require evaluation to determine if they are low impact. To aid in quantifyin...

The U.S. Forest Service and other federal land managers are responsible for maintaining the productivity of aquatic–riparian ecosystems, the associated native biota, and the ecosystem services they provide. These public lands are important sources of water, recreation opportunities, and habitat for a suite of animals and plants, including many that are protected under the Endangered Species Act. To meet these challenges and responsibilities, recent science suggests modifying practices to provide a broader array of habitat, biological conditions, and ecosystem functions than are associated...

This study examines the potential of combining decision support approaches to identify optimal bundles of ecosystem services in a framework characterized by multiple decision-makers. A forested landscape, Zona de Intervenção Florestal of Paiva and Entre-Douro and Sousa (ZIF_VS) in Portugal, is used to test and demonstrate this potential. The landscape extends over 14,388 ha, representing 1976 stands. The property is fragmented into 376 holdings. The overall analysis was performed in three steps. First, we selected six alternative solutions (A to F) in a Pareto frontier generated by a...

Pacific martens (Martes caurina humboldtensis) in coastal forests of Oregon and northern California in the United States are rare and geographically isolated, prompting a petition for listing under the Endangered Species Act. If listed, regulations have the potential to influence land-use decisions on public and private lands, but no estimates of population size, density, or viability of remnant marten populations are available for evaluating their conservation status. We used GPS and VHF telemetry and spatial mark-resight to estimate home ranges, density, and population size of Pacific...