Treesearch

This plant profile for Heteromeles arbutifolia provides information on species distribution; taxonomic relationships; ecological and evolutionary considerations for restoration; growth form and distinguishing traits; habitat characteristics; projected future suitable habitat; growth, reproduction and dispersal; biological interactions; ecological genetics; seed characteristics, germination requirements and processing; and plant uses including agriculture, restoration, and traditional products, plus an extensive bibliography. It is part of Riverside-Corona Resource Conservation District's...

This plant profile for Prunus ilicifolia provides information on species distribution; taxonomic relationships; ecological and evolutionary considerations for restoration; growth form and distinguishing traits; habitat characteristics; projected future suitable habitat; growth, reproduction and dispersal; biological interactions; ecological genetics; seed characteristics, germination requirements and processing; and plant uses including agriculture, restoration, and traditional products, plus an extensive bibliography. It is part of Riverside-Corona Resource Conservation District's...

The United States is at an infrastructural crossroads. First, the climate is changing faster than built infrastructure and the institutions that manage and maintain it. Recent extreme weather events highlight the precarious state of the nation’s infrastructure and the ability of cities to adapt to climate change. After the nation in 2016 broiled through its hottest summer on record, 2017 began with one of the wettest winters on record for California and the Pacific Northwest. The 2017 hurricane season proved to be the most devastating and costly in the nation’s history.

Clouds and aerosols increase the fraction of global solar irradiance that is diffuse light. This phenomenon is known to increase the photosynthetic light use efficiency (LUE) of closed-canopy vegetation by redistributing photosynthetic photon flux density (400–700 nm) from saturated, sunlit leaves at the top of the canopy, to shaded leaves deeper in the canopy. We combined a process-based carbon cycle model with 10 years of eddy covariance carbon flux measurements and other ancillary data sets to assess 1) how this LUE enhancement influences interannual variation in carbon uptake, and 2)...

In this chapter, we aim for three goals: (1) We summarize some key features from the chapters, as they pertain to the overall themes of the book. The chapters themselves provide great resources to bring awareness to some newer and broader aspects of forest ecosystem services as well as a literature-rich, synthetic approach to understanding these advances and future visions for related research and application. We will highlight some of those points here. (2) We then aim to provide some emerging messages resulting from these newer approaches to understanding the complexities of planning...

Human beings derive direct benefit from an array of ecosystem goods as well as from the activities and products of organisms, in both wild and human-dominated ecosystems (Daily et al. 1997; Levin and Lubchenco 2008). These benefits from nature have been readily available throughout most of human history. To this day, societies take many of these natural services for granted (Daily 1997, MEA 2005), even while the support systems that provide them are being severely degraded (Vitousek et al. 1997; Levin and Lubchenco 2008; Seppelt et al. 2011). The central challenge of this century is to...

Soil organic matter (SOM) turnover increasingly is conceptualized as a tension between accessibility to microorganisms and protection from decomposition via physical and chemical association with minerals in emerging soil biogeochemical theory. Yet, these components are missing from the original mathematical models of belowground carbon dynamics and remain underrepresented in more recent compartmental models that separate SOM into discrete pools with differing turnover times. Thus, a gap currently exists between the emergent understanding of SOM dynamics and our ability to improve terrestri...

Coastal plains of all tropical and subtropical latitudes are the habitat for a number of highly specialized plants able to establish in a range of sandy to clayey soils, submitted to periodical flooding from rainfall and tides, tolerant to large variations of salinity of soils interstitial water, withstanding coastal winds and sea-salt spray, and submitted to yearlong high solar irradiation and day temperatures. In northern South America semi-arid climates predominate in the southern Caribbean coasts from 10 to 15° N, an area that includes from the Goajira peninsula in Colombia to the...

The Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV) had extensive bottomland hardwood forests but less than 25% of this area remains forested today. Impounded greentree reservoirs (GTRs), have been managed for wintering waterfowl since the 1930s, and provide a source of aquatic invertebrates and acorns for foraging ducks and other wildlife. However, few studies of invertebrate community-composition, diversity, and biomass have been conducted at regional scales. We collected samples of aquatic invertebrates from three hardwood bottomlands in the MAV and one in the Mississippi Interior Flatwoods region...

This publication provides an overview of the forest resources in West Virginia based upon inventories conducted by the U.S. 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 2004, FIA has implemented an annual inventory measuring 14 percent of sample plots each year. For the 2017 inventory, estimates for current variables, such as area, volume, and biomass, are based on 2,424 (2,086 forested) plots inventoried from 2011–2017. Change variables,...