Treesearch

Outdoor recreation is one of many important benefits provided by public lands. Data on recreational use are critical for informing management of recreation resources, however, managers often lack actionable information on visitor use for large protected areas that lack controlled access points. The purpose of this study is to explore the potential for social media data (e.g., geotagged images shared on Flickr and trip reports shared on a hiking forum) to provide land managers with useful measures of recreational use to dispersed areas, and to provide lessons learned from comparing several...

Although burned trees are the most visible damage following a wildfire, a forest’s soil can also be damaged. The heat generated by a wildfire can alter the soil’s physical properties and kill the fungi and bacteria that are responsible for nutrient cycling and other ecosystem services. What isn’t well understood is the extent of the heating within the soil and how quickly the soil recovers. In the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest in the Deschutes National Forest, researchers with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, Oregon State University, and Kansas State Universit...

Hurricanes Irma and Maria struck Puerto Rico on the 6th and 20th of September 2017, respectively. These two powerful Cat 5 hurricanes severely defoliated forest canopy and deposited massive amounts of litterfall in the forests across the island. We established a 1-ha research plot in each of four forests (Guánica State Forest, Río Abajo State Forest, Guayama Research Area and Luquillo Experiment Forest) before September 2016, and had collected one full year data of litterfall production prior to the arrival of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Hurricane-induced litterfall was collected within one...

This publication provides an overview of forest resources in South Dakota based on an inventory conducted by the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program at the Northern Research Station (NRS) in cooperation with the South Dakota Department of Agriculture, Resource Conservation and Forestry Division. Estimates are based on field data collected using the FIA annualized sample design and are updated yearly. Information about the national and regional FIA program is available at http://fia.fs.fed.us. For the 2017 inventory, the statewide base sample was augmented by a...

High-throughput sequencing of DNA barcodes, such as the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) of the 16s rRNA sequence, has expanded the ability of researchers to investigate the endophytic fungal communities of living plants. With a large and growing database of complete fungal genomes, it may be possible to utilize portions of fungal symbiont genomes outside conventional marker sequences for community analysis of short-read data. We designed a bioinformatics pipeline to identify putative fungal coding sequences from 100 bp Illumina reads of DNA extracted from several angiosperm species...

A vast amount of future climate scenario datasets, created by climate models such as general circulation models (GCMs), have been used in conjunction with watershed models to project future climate variability impact on hydrological processes and water quality. However, these low spatial-temporal resolution datasets are often difficult to downscale spatially and disaggregate temporarily, and they may not be accurate for local watersheds (i.e., state level or smaller watersheds). This study applied the US-EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)’s Climate Assessment Tool (CAT) to create future...

Fire is a key ecological driver in determining vegetation composition, biomass, and ecosystem dynamics in coniferous forests of the Laurentian Mixed Forest in the Great Lakes region (Cleland and others 2004, Frelich 1995). Regional projections of future climate conditions indicate warmer temperatures, more variable precipitation patterns, and greater moisture stress (Handler and others 2014). These conditions are likely to increase the occurrence of drought that in turn influences fire risk and severity (Clark 1989, Neary and others 2008). For example, a recent modeling investigation of...

Hurricanes have long been a powerful and recurring disturbance in many coastal forest ecosystems. Intense hurricanes often produce a large amount of dead fuels in their affected forests. How the post-hurricane fuel complex changes with time, due todecomposition and management such as salvage, and its implications for fire behavior remain largely unknown. Therefore, the primary objective of the project was to study posthurricane fuel dynamics and its effect on fire behavior by conducting field measurements and comparing fire behavior for undamaged stands and hurricane-damaged stands in...

Although mostly occurring as associate tree species in forest communities, Persea has a wide native distribution in southeast coastal plains (Shearman and others 2015). Laurel wilt disease (LWD) is a lethal vascular infection of trees in the laurel family (Lauraceae) caused by the fungus Raffaelea lauricola (Fraedrich and others 2008). The fungus is vectored by a nonnative ambrosia beetle (Xyleborus glabratus), which was first recorded in the United States in 2002 (Rabaglia and others 2006). Laurel wilt disease was first reported in 2003 in redbay (P. borbonia), and has since spread...

Understanding the impacts of mountain pine beetle (MPB; Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) on fire behavior is important from both an ecological and land management viewpoint. However, numerous uncertainties exist in the linkages of MPB-caused treemortality to changes in canopy and surface fuels (e.g., fuel loading, arrangement, and availability) and the effects on simulated and observed fire behavior in MPB-attacked forests. Current fuel inputs to fire behavior models may be poorly suited to predict fire behavior in these disturbed forests because of inappropriate assumptions, resolutions,...