Treesearch

Policy makers who wish to spur economic development in rural forests face challenges that include population decline and poverty. Protected land and natural amenities enhance the quality of life and prospects for economic development, but there is limited research on how different types of protected land or natural amenities affect the rural forest economy. We use county level variables for protected areas differentiated by access and extractive use, and natural amenities differentiated by climate, water area, and topography to explain spatial variation in labor and built space markets....

Increased global biosecurity threats to trees, woods and forests have been strongly linked to the upsurge in worldwide trade and the expansion of tourism. A whole range of social, economic and political actors are implicated and affected by the movement of pests and diseases along these international pathways. A number of factors affect the actions of stakeholders, and wider public, including their values and motivations, how risks are perceived and acted upon, their ability to act, as well as the existing regulatory and economic environment. Understanding these factors is key to any...

Areas of northern California, USA, have been identified as quality habitat for an expanded California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) Recovery Program. Nonetheless, lead poisoning continues to complicate California Condor recovery efforts within their current range and threatens the viability of future propagules. Therefore, background levels of lead and other contaminants should be assessed as part of a feasibility analysis to determine the efficacy of expanding the Recovery Program into northern California. A California-wide ban on the use of lead ammunition for hunting, scheduled to go...

Background: A regional individual-tree Height-Diameter (H-D) model was developed for ponderosa pine (P. ponderosa var. ponderosa and var. scopulorum), for the western United States. The dataset came from long-term permanent research plots in even-aged pure stands, both planted and natural on sites capable of the productivity estimated by Meyer [Meyer, W.H., 1938. Yield of Even-Aged Stands of Ponderosa Pine. USDA Technical Bulletin 630]. The database used a common study plan. The study plan divided the range of ponderosa pine trees into five provinces, with installations in Arizona (AZ),...

Conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to electricity using fuel cell technologies is a promising but challenging research topic for sustainable electricity production. This is because that lignocellulosic biomass generally cannot be directly used as a fuel for electricity generation in a conventional fuel cell with high efficiency. Typical fuel cells that can convert lignocellulosic biomass to electricity under mild conditions ( < 100 °C) include microbial fuel cells (MFC) and novel direct biomass fuel cells (DBFC) such as that mediated by polyoxometalates (POMs) developed recently....

Basal area (BA) is a good predictor of timber stand volume and forest growth. This study developed predictive models using field and airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data for estimation of basal area in Pinus taeda plantation in south Brazil. In the field, BA was collected from conventional forest inventory plots. Multiple linear regression models for predicting BA from LiDAR-derived metrics were developed and evaluated for predictive power and parsimony. The best model to predict BA from a family of six models was selected based on corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc)...

ln the United States of America (USA), forest land is defined with respect to four criteria: (1) minimum area of 0.4 ha, (2) minimum crown cover of 10%, (3) minimum width of 36.6 m, and (4) forest use. Total forest land currently exceeds 310 million ha and has generally been increasing since the 1920s, despite a near tripling of the human population. Currently, more than 30% of the country is characterized as forest land with 58% of it in various categories of private ownership. Unlike in many European countries, private forest land owners in the USA have considerable freedom to convert...

This chapter will discuss the impact of trace metals in kraft cooking and brownstock washing Although numerous trace metals are present, calcium tends to be the main concern because it is present at higher concentration and is the source of most scale problems encountered in mills. Calcium Will also be the principal focus of this chapter. Other trace metals create management concerns in mills, but generally not within the brownstock washing system and cannot be effectively addressed Within that system.

The development of new and improved wood adhesives is hindered by an incomplete mechanistic understanding of what makes a wood-adhesive bond able to withstand changes in moisture levels. Although common methods are used to test and report the bulk level properties of bondlines, such as bondline shear strength and wood failure analysis, sufficient experimental tools to study wood-adhesive bondlines and the effects of moisture at the nm- to mm-length scales are lacking. Here we review recently developed tools that, when combined, are capable of studying bondlines and the effects of moisture...

Furfural and levulinic acid (LA) are potential major renewable platform chemicals for producing biochemicals and biofuels. In this study, integrated conversion of corncob to furfural and LA was carried out in a one-pot system using p-toluenesulfonic acid (p-TsOH) and step temperature profiling. A batch reaction incorporating distillation (BRD) resulted in a good furfural production yield of 61.6% based on the corncob xylan content for the hydrolysis conditions tested. Distillation not only reduced furfural loss due to side reactions to humins, but also resulted in a fairly pure and...