Treesearch

Climate change may both exacerbate the vulnerabilities and open up new opportunities for farming in the Northeastern USA. Among the opportunities are double-cropping and new crop options that may come with warmer temperatures and a longer frost-free period. However, prolonged periods of spring rains in recent years have delayed planting and offset the potentially beneficial longer frost-free period.Water management will be a serious challenge for Northeast farmers in the future, with projections for increased frequency of heavy rainfall events, as well as projections for more frequent...

The livestock industries are a major contributor to the economy of the northeastern United States. Climate models predict increased average maximum temperatures, days with temperatures exceeding 25 °C, and higher annual precipitation in the Northeast. These environmental changes combined with increased atmospheric CO2 concentration are expected to either increase or decrease forage productivity depending on the crop, and may decrease protein content and forage digestibility. Winter damage to sensitive forage species may also increase. Predicted temperature increases are expected to reduce...

Extending from the Canadian province of Alberta to the Transverse Volcanic Plateau of Mexico, Pinus strobiformis is part of a species complex with two geographically adjacent, but nonsympatric, species, namely P. flexilis and P. ayacahuite. Pinus strobiformis is classified as being of least concern and at lower risk according to the guidelines of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List (IUCN 2014). In Mexico, this frequent tree species is protected and included in Mexican Regulation NOM-059-2010. Pinus strobiformis appears to have broad...

Climate-based predictions of species distributions provide information for understanding impacts of climate change. However, species distribution models do not include land management zones as input. Improving understanding of geographic shifts will require consideration of management zones where certain activities could facilitate or impede responses to climate change. For instance, assisted migration to overcome dispersal barriers could be challenged in areas designated for “untrammeled” character (e.g., wilderness). Alternatively, large tracts of land with uninterrupted disturbance...

This publication provides an overview of the forest resources in Maine based upon inventories conducted by the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the Northern Research Station. Information about the national and regional FIA program is available online at www.fia.fs.fed.us. Since 1999, FIA has implemented an annual inventory in the State and currently measures 20 percent of the sample plots each year. For the 2017 inventory, estimates for current variables, such as area, volume, and biomass, are based on 3,526 plots inventoried from 2013-2017. Change...

Forests cannot be managed sustainably without reliable data to inform decisions. National Forest Inventories (NFI) tend to report national statistics, with sub-national stratification based on domestic ecological classification systems. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to report statistics on ecosystems that span international borders, as global change and globalization expand stakeholders’ spheres of concern. The state of a transnational ecosystem can only be properly assessed by examining the entire ecosystem. In global forest resource assessments, it may be useful to...

This publication provides an overview of the forest resources in Massachusetts based upon inventories conducted by the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the Northern Research Station. Information about the national and regional FIA program is available online at www.fia.fs.fed.us. Since 2003, FIA has implemented an annual inventory in the State and currently measures 14 percent of the sample plots each year. For the 2017 inventory, estimates for current variables, such as area, volume, and biomass, are based on 790 plots inventoried from 2011-2017. Change...

This publication provides an overview of the forest resources in Rhode Island based upon inventories conducted by the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the Northern Research Station. Information about the national and regional FIA program is available online at www.fia.fs.fed.us. Since 2003, FIA has implemented an annual inventory in the State and currently measures 14 percent of the sample plots each year. For the 2017 inventory, estimates for current variables, such as area, volume, and biomass, are based on 222 plots inventoried from 2011-2017. Change...

Mixed land ownership affects the scope for cooperative bargaining between jurisdictions to undertake control activities to slow the spread of an invasive species. We consider a problem in which emerald ash borer (EAB) spreads from an infested to an uninfested jurisdiction, where both contain ash trees on public and private land. We develop a dynamic model of cooperative Nash bargaining to examine how the mix of land ownership within each municipality affects the path of a negotiated transfer payment from the uninfested to the infested jurisdiction. Using a numerical simulation, we demonstra...

The Short-Range Ensemble Forecast (SREF) system is verified and bias corrected for fire weather days (FWDs) defined as having an elevated probability of wildfire occurrence using a statistical Fire Weather Index (FWI) over a subdomain of the northeastern United States (NEUS) between 2007 and 2014. The SREF is compared to the Rapid Update Cycle and Rapid Refresh analyses for temperature, relative humidity, specific humidity, and the FWI. An additive bias correction is employed using the most recent previous 14 days [sequential bias correction (SBC)] and the most recent previous 14 FWDs...