Treesearch

Utah lotus (Lotus utahensis Ottley) is a North American leguminous forb that may hold promise for rangeland revegetation in the western United States for diversifying planting mixtures, attracting pollinators, providing high-quality forage, and expanding habitats for insects needed by sage-grouse chicks. Fourteen wildland seed collections of Utah lotus originating from Nevada and Utah were assessed for genetic variation of a wide range of phenotypic traits and genetic relationships. Population structure estimates defined by 552 amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers identifie...

Human‐caused climate change is predicted to affect the frequency of hazard linked extremes. Unusually large wildfires, individually or expressed as area burned over time, are a type of extreme event that is constrained by climate and can be a hazard to society but also an important ecological disturbance. Here we project changes in the frequency of extreme monthly area burned by wildfires for the end of the 21st century for a wildfire‐prone region in the southeast United States. Predicting changes in area burned is complicated by the large and varied uncertainties in how the climate will...

Wildfires, harvesting, and beetle outbreaks all have different effects on forest dynamics and biogeochemical responses. Responses to beetle outbreaks vary with forest species composition, understory conditions, tree size and age, and other factors. Larger trees are more susceptible to mountain pine beetle attack. Mixed-age stands at the Fraser Experimental Forest had lower overall tree mortality and greater recovery potential. These findings provide support for maintaining age, species, and structural diversity within headwater forests.

Forest management that creates a diversity of prey habitats in ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests is beneficial to gos-hawks. The desired habitat diversity includes all tree age classes with a focus on older trees in fine-scale mosaics composed of groups of trees, scattered individual trees, large snags and logs and small openings with species-diverse and productive herbaceous-shrub communities.

Forests in the eastern United States have become fragmented by urban development and agriculture, creating a landscape of remnant forest patches. Many bird species rely on these fragments for breeding habitat, but habitat selection in these patches is not well-understood. Our objective was to examine the effects of forest structure, native plants, and invertebrate biomass on the occupancy of an assemblage of common Eastern songbird species in suburban forest fragments. We collected data at 98 plots in remnant forest patches in Delaware and Maryland. Avian point counts were conducted three...

Background: Restriction site associated DNA sequencing (RADseq) has the potential to be a broadly applicable, low-cost approach for high-quality genetic linkage mapping in forest trees lacking a reference genome. The statistical inference of linear order must be as accurate as possible for the correct ordering of sequence scaffolds and contigs to chromosomal locations. Accurate maps also facilitate the discovery of chromosome segments containing allelic variants conferring resistance to the biotic and abiotic stresses that threaten forest trees worldwide. We used ddRADseq for genetic...

Land transfer decisions for family forest owners (FFOs) potentially have large consequences for the critical public benefits these lands provide, but what triggers and influences the decisions are just beginning to be understood. The 2013 USA National Woodland Owner Survey provides an unprecedented set of national data to better understand near-term plans to sell or give away forestland either in its entirety or by subdividing. This study uses multinomial logit analysis to explore whether the likelihood of selling or giving away any or all of forestland within 5 years has some systematic...

Production of woody biomass for bioenergy, whether wood pellets or liquid biofuels, has the potential to cause substantial landscape change and concomitant effects on forest ecosystems, but the landscape effects of alternative production scenarios have not been fully assessed. We simulated landscape change from 2010 to 2050 under five scenarios of woody biomass production for wood pellets and liquid biofuels in North Carolina, in the southeastern United States, a region that is a substantial producer of wood biomass for bioenergy and contains high biodiversity. Modeled scenarios varied...

Domestic and foreign renewable energy targets and financial incentives have increased demand for woody biomass and bioenergy in the southeastern United States. This demand is expected to be met through purpose-grown agricultural bioenergy crops, short-rotation tree plantations, thinning and harvest of planted and natural forests, and forest harvest residues. With results from a forest economics model, spatially explicit state-and-transition simulation models, and species-habitat models, we projected change in habitat amount for 16 wildlife species caused by meeting a renewable fuel target...

For organisms with overlapping generations that occur in metapopulations, uncertainty remains regarding the spatiotemporal scale of inference of estimates of the effective number of breeders (Nb) and whether these estimates can be used to predict generational Ne. We conducted a series of tests of the spatiotemporal scale of inference of estimates of Nb in nine consecutive cohorts within a long-term study of brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis). We also tested a recently developed approach to estimate generational Ne from Nb and compared this to an alternative approach for estimating Ne that...