Treesearch

This resource bulletin describes the principal findings of the 2019 forest inventory of Oklahoma (conducted January 13, 2010 to July 6, 2021)—the first report on a complete, annualized inventory of central and western Oklahoma, and changes since the previous report, Oklahoma’s Forests, 2014. The survey finds nearly 12 million acres in Oklahoma are forest land, mostly in private ownership. These forest lands contain more than 5 billion trees, 10 billion cubic feet of wood, and 250 million short tons of biomass. Net change in volume was positive, with an increase of 93.9 million cubic feet.

The Appalachian Mountains in eastern North America are a global biodiversity hotspot for woodland salamanders (genus Plethodon) and contain many range-restricted species endemic to areas of high elevation. Previous research indicates that interspecific competition could exert a strong influence on geographic distribution boundaries and local occurrence probabilities for high-elevation salamanders, but competition dynamics have not been assessed for most species. We investigated co-occurrence and competition dynamics between 2 large woodland salamanders that occur on Shenandoah Mountain in...

In the United States, voluntary carbon markets have gained significant traction in recent years. However, many offset standards, protocols, and credit ratings have come under scrutiny from the public and investors for failing to produce real or sustainable carbon offsets. Additionally, communities often find themselves unprepared to advocate for forest-based carbon projects that align with their needs and interests, mainly due to a lack of information and a general distrust surrounding carbon projects. There is a pressing need to address the social, ecological, and technological barriers...

Progressively more intense and frequent forest fires in western North America have led to higher demand for active fuels management activities. The most common method to manage fuel loads in western forests is fuels reduction thinning. Concurrently, growing evidence highlights the importance of forests as valuable habitat for native bees. However, the effects of fuels reduction thinning on bees are not well understood in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), United States. We examined how thinning affected native blooming plant and bee communities by conducting a before-after, control-impact (BACI)...

The necessity of biomass valorization arises from global energy and environmental and economic challenges. Catalytic transformation of biomass into fuels, chemicals, and other valuable products has emerged as a promising approach toward a sustainable and circular economy. The primary objective of this review is to provide a timely and comprehensive overview of the entire value chain for the high-value utilization of biomass, covering the entire process from biomass feedstock and its preliminary conversion to catalytic upgrading, and finally to the production of fuels, chemicals, and other...

This study presents a borax–water‐activated cellulose nanofiber (BWCNF) material that can be readily transformed into robust three‐dimensional (3D) electronics through molding and freeform direct laser writing (FDLW). Compared with untreated cellulose nanofiber (CNF), BWCNF exhibits 135% of the tensile strength and 186% of the extensibility. Molded wavy structures also show excellent shape retention, with negligible force–strain hysteresis (<0.5%) over 1000 stretch–release cycles at 40% strain. Laser‐induced graphene (LIG) can be patterned directly on these 3D BWCNF structures, yielding a...

Slot die coating with vacuum‐assist has been developed as a novel and scalable methodology for coating glass fiber fabrics as a pre‐step to composite fabrication. In particular, the slot die coating of cellulose nanocrystal suspension, a material which has been recognized as an emerging renewable material for fiber sizing, is subject to further exploration due to the limited scalability studies. In this paper, a multiscale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is developed, representing and combining separate 2D models of macroscale coating flow on top of the fabrics as well as microscal...

Cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), owing to their high crystallinity, thermal stability, and strong mechanical performance, serve as promising candidates for sustainable, high gas barrier packaging materials. However, their inherent moisture sensitivity and poor water resistance limit their practical applications. This study presents a strategy to overcome this limitation by constructing a network within CNC coating layers using 1,2,3,4-butanetetracarboxylic acid (BTCA) as a cross-linker and sodium hypophosphite (SHP) as a catalyst. The resulting cross-linked network had improved water...

Biochar derived from woody feedstocks is typically high in carbon, low in ash, and relatively low in nutrients compared with agricultural biochar, making it especially suitable for long-term carbon storage. Current evidence indicates that key functional properties for forestry applications include biochar yield, fixed carbon, pH, nutrient content, and porosity. Across studies, there is broad agreement that these properties are shaped by both feedstock and production conditions, particularly pyrolysis temperature and residence time. Yield and fixed carbon appear to be driven mainly by...

Quantitative width distributions of cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) are difficult to obtain from microscopy when fibrils are highly branched and entangled, and when manual measurements rely on sparse sampling and subjective fibril selection. Here we present FACT (Fibril Analysis for Cellulose Technology), a semi-automated image-analysis framework that extracts length-weighted fibril width distributions from negative-contrast scanning electron microscopy (NegC-SEM) images. FACT uses machine-learning segmentation (either the ImageJ Weka plugin or a U-Net convolutional neural network) to...