Treesearch

Fuel reduction treatments are used to reduce wildfire risk and to restore plant communities. Yet, repeated mechanical or prescribed fire treatments may gradually change forest structure and microhabitat conditions, favoring some taxa and decreasing suitability for others. We experimentally assessed long-term (intermittent years, 2003–2016) effects of repeated dormant seasonmechanical and prescribed fire treatments on capture rates of reptiles and amphibians in southern Appalachian upland hardwood forests. Treatments were mechanical understory removal (twice), prescribed burning (4 times;...

Most ecosystems have multiple-plant invaders rather than single-plant invaders, yet ecological studies and management actions focus largely on single invader species. There is a need for general principles regarding invader interactions across varying environmental conditions, so that secondary invasions can be anticipated and managers can allocate resources toward pretreatment or postremoval actions. By reviewing removal experiments conducted in three Hawaiian ecosystems (a dry tropical forest, a seasonally dry mesic forest, and a lowland wet forest), we evaluate the roles environmental...

Identifying and quantifying the importance of environmental variables in structuring population genetic variation can help inform management decisions for conservation, restoration, or reforestation purposes, in both current and future environmental conditions. Landscape genomics offers a powerful approach for understanding the environmental factors that currently associate with genetic variation, and given those associations, where populations may be most vulnerable under future environmental change. Here, we applied genotyping by sequencing to generate over 11,000 single nucleotide...

Deadwood in forests influences fire intensity, stores carbon and nutrients, and provides wildlife habitat. We used a 54-year-old density management experiment in Larix occidentalis Nutt. forests to evaluate density dependence of woody detritus accumulation. Based on self-thinning theory, we expected woody detritus produced by the current stand to increase with stand density. Density-dependent woody detritus accumulation was apparent for fine woody debris and snags and for all woody detritus pools combined. Clear size-density relationships were apparent for coarse woody debris (CWD) and...

Trees in cities provide valuable ecosystem services that can improve quality of life, but also face a variety of stressors that can threaten these benefits. Urban forests are especially vulnerable to climate change stressors because predominant species may rely on irrigation and other intensive management practices, and rates of climate change may be more rapid and extreme in cities than in rural areas (Van der Veken et al., 2008). Identifying and testing the resilience of tree species to climate change stressors is critical to the long-term stability of urban forests. By gradually...

Current research on interactions between ecological disturbances emphasizes the potential for greatly enhanced ecological effects that may occur when disturbances interact. Much less attention has focused on the possibility of disturbance interactions that buffer ecological change. In this review, we discuss and classify evidence for interactions between two forest disturbances common in eastern North America—wind damage and fire—- focusing on studies where forest wind damage precedes fire. Interaction mechanisms are classified according to how they influence ecosystem resistance to and...

This report is a companion report to the National Report on Sustainable Forests, except that the analysis in this case is specifically applied to tropical forests found on U.S. islands and U.S.-affiliated island jurisdictions in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Like its national counterpart, the report uses the Montréal Process Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management (MP C&I) to provide a comprehensive picture of forest conditions. Each of the seven criteria in the MP C&I is given a separate chapter, and the resulting analysis includes consideration of ecological,...

Es conocido que la biodiversidad de aves puede cambiar con la alteración del ambiente debido a factores de actividades humanas como la deforestación, que causa la fragmentación y el deterioro en la calidad de su hábitat o de su territorio de invierno, en el caso de las aves migratorias. El cambio climático incide también, especialmente por sequías prolongadas que pueden causar la destrucción de grandes sectores del bosque. El estudio del uso del hábitat y su biodiversidad en los diferentes ecosistemas es fundamental para la evaluación de la calidad ambiental. El análisis sobre la distribuci...

Spaceborne SAR interferometry (InSAR) has the potential of detecting forest change on a global scale with fine (meter-level) spatial resolution as well as on a monthly/weekly basis regardless of day or night. This is significant to characterize the land-use change and its impact on climate change. In this paper, both single-pass and repeat-pass SAR interferometry from spaceborne sensors are combined in order to detect and quantify (with Normalized RMSE ≤ 30%) forest disturbance at a large scale (dozens of kilometers) however with a fine spatial resolution (<; 1 hectare) based on two newly...

An upward shift in elevation is one of the most conspicuous species responses to climate change. Nevertheless, downward shifts and, apparently, the absences of response have also been recently reported. Given the growing evidence of multiple responses of species distributions due to climate change and the paucity of studies in the tropics, we evaluated the response of a montane bird community to climate change, without the confounding effects of land‐use change. To test for elevational shifts, we compared the distribution of 21 avian species in 1998 and 2015 using occupancy models. The...