Treesearch

Chestnuts (Castanea) are major nut crops in East Asia and southern Europe, and are unique among temperate nut crops in that the harvested seeds are starchy rather than oily. Chestnut species have been cultivated for three millennia or more in China, so it is likely that artificial selection has affected the genome of orchard-grown chestnuts. The genetics of Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima Blume) domestication are also of interest to breeders of hybrid American chestnut, especially if the low-growing, branching habit of Chinese chestnut, an impediment to American chestnut restoration,...

This publication supersedes FPL General Technical Report FPL-GTR-11, “Protecting Log Cabins from Decay” (1977), and FPL Report Number 982, “Making Log Cabins Endure: Suggestions on Construction, Log Selection, Preservation, and Finishing” (1974). These prior reports provided recommendations for preservative formulation and application that are not currently allowed under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations. However, much of the information on log home construction and design remains of value and was transferred from those earlier reports. Additional information was added on...

This report identifies the priority areas in residential construction where technical research and technological advancements offer potential to benefit the industry as it strives to advance the quality of housing and meet today’s market expectations for a home’s cost, performance, durability, and environmental stewardship. The prioritization is performed by home builders based on their experience with constructing new homes.

The U.S. housing market’s quarter three indicated slight improvement from the second quarter, with the exception of multifamily construction. Improvement spending declined within the quarter, quarter-over-quarter, and year-over-year. Viewed from a recent historical context, all housing construction subsectors exceeded the record lows recorded in the 2008 to 2011 time period.

The collective U.S. housing market was mixed in January, and once again new SF sales were revised sharply downward. SF housing starts were robust, and other data series appear to have flat-lined on a monthly basis. Regionally, data were mixed across all sectors. New SF construction and remodeling spending remain positive, increasing at an incremental pace.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi in the soil may influence tropical tree dynamics and forest succession. The mechanisms are poorly understood, because the functional characteristics and abundances of tree species and AM fungi are likely to be codependent. We used generalized joint attribute modeling to evaluate if AM fungi are associated with three forest community metrics for a sub-tropical montane forest in Puerto Rico. The metrics chosen to reflect changes during forest succession are the abundance of seedlings of different successional status, the amount of foliar damage on seedlings...

The South’s production of pulpwood increased from 60.6 million cords in 2015 to 64.5 million cords in 2016. Roundwood production increased by 1.8 million cords to 51.2 million cords and accounted for 79 percent of the South’s total pulpwood production. The use of wood residue increased 19 percent to 13.3 million cords in 2016. Alabama and Georgia led the South in total production, with 10.3 and 10.1 million cords, respectively. In 2016, 78 southern pulpmills were operating and drawing wood from the 13 Southern States.

Chaparral, among the most stable and resilient vegetation types in California, has shown signs of degradation by altered fire frequency, drought, non-native species, recreation, urban development, and possibly anthropogenic nitrogen deposition in southern California. Restoration has been practiced less frequently in chaparral than other, more extensively disturbed vegetation types, but recent degradation suggests that restoration may be important for the maintenance of ecosystem services such as slope stabilization, carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and scenic beauty. Most...

The goal of this study was to demonstrate how synchrotron-based X-ray fluorescence microscopy (XFM) can be used to better understand the mechanisms of copper tolerance in wood decay fungi. Copper is a major component in commercial wood preservatives as it is toxic to many wood decay fungi. However, certain fungi are copper tolerant and can attack preservative-treated wood, resulting in structural damage to treated wood members. Here we used large-field XFM to visualize six different elements (K, Ca, Mn, Fe, Cu, and Zn) in the mycelia and wood inoculated with four different species of brown...

Savanna and woodland are transitional vegetation communities that have largely disappeared while many earlysuccessional bird species have simultaneously declined in abundance. Pine savanna and woodland are being restored in the Midwest through prescribed fire and tree thinning to create their characteristic open canopy, dense ground layer, and variable shrub cover. Ideally, these restoration strategies for vegetation should also facilitate bird conservation objectives. We determined daily nest survival (DSR) for 6 songbird species, representing both shrubnesting and canopy-nesting species,...