Treesearch

Quantifying species-habitat relationships provides guidance for establishment of recovery standards for endangered species, but research on forest bird habitat has been limited by availability of fine-grained forest structure data across broad extents. New tools for collection of data on forest bird response to fine-grained forest structure provide opportunities to evaluate habitat thresholds for forest birds. We used LiDAR-derived estimates of habitat attributes and resource selection to evaluate foraging habitat thresholds for recovery of the federally endangered red-cockaded woodpecker...

Current research has shown that urban trees can contribute significantly to stormwater volume control by retaining rainfall in the canopy of trees and increasing infiltration. The potential role of urban trees for stormwater design was evaluated at a proof-of-concept level for a planning study of part of the University of Wisconsin (UW)—Madison campus in 2016. There is currently no regulatory stormwater performance credit for trees in Wisconsin, and the effects of urban trees are not simulated by WinSLAMM or other common design models. The purpose of this project is to demonstrate a simple...

The consistent sporadic transmission of West Nile Virus (WNV) in the city of New Orleans justifies the need for distribution risk maps highlighting human risk of mosquito bites. We modeled the influence of biophysical and socioeconomic metrics on the spatio-temporal distributions of presence/vector-host contact (VHC) ratios of WNV vector, Culex quinquefasciatus, within their flight range. Biophysical and socioeconomic data were extracted within 5-km buffer radii around sampling localities of gravid female Culex quinquefasciatus. The spatio-temporal correlations between VHC data and 33...

Weather is an important factor for air quality. While there have been increasing attentions to long-term (monthly and seasonal) air pollution such as regional hazes from land-clearing fires during El Niño, the weather-air quality relationships are much less understood at long-term than short-term (daily and weekly) scales. This study is aimed to fill this gap through analyzing correlations between meteorological variables and air quality at various timescales. A regional correlation scale was defined to measure the longest time with significant correlations at a substantial large number of...

New forests are expanding around the world. In many regions, regrowth rates are surpassing deforestation rates, resulting in “forest transitions,” or net gains in forest cover. Typically measured only in terms of aggregate“'forest cover” change, these new forests are ecologically distinct from each other and from those originally cleared. We ask, what are the ecological attributes, goods, and services we might expect from different pathways of forest recovery? To address this question, we proposed a typology of forest transitions that reflects both their social drivers and ecological...

The recreational opportunities available across landscapes of the Southern United States can be broad and diverse, and collectively are considered a subset of cultural ecosystem services. In describing the settings of recreational opportunities, a number of methods have been proposed that are based in part on geographic information and that can be facilitated by geographical analyses. Presented here are two expedient and cost-effective methods for assessing the recreation supply potential of large, heavily-roaded areas that are situated mainly with privately-owned land in the Southern...

To date, economic valuation studies have focused on individual rivers and not the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System (NWSRS) as a whole. Following Morton (1999), we provide a brief conceptual taxonomy of on- and off-site economic benefits that might be relevant to the NWSRS. These benefits include values associated with individual rivers within the NWSRS and benefits of the system, including ecosystem services. The published empirical literature is also reviewed, focusing on the economic valuation of wild and scenic rivers. Although the empirical studies and valuation results are...

Sixteen species of scorpionflieshave been reported from Vietnam, consisting of 13 Neopanorpa and three Bittacus species. One of these scorpionflies from the central highlands of Vietnam with hood-shaped hypovalves was determined to be a new species and is described herein as Neopanorpa cucullata, n. sp. A second new species Neopanorpa ellengreeni, n. sp. with golden yellow wing membranes and Y-shaped wing markings is described from northern Vietnam. CO1 DNA analysis of 16 of 17 species of Vietnamese Mecoptera are presented using a neighbor-joining tree indicating that the new species are...

This periodic resource update provides an overview of forest resources in North Carolina based on an inventory conducted by the U.S. Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program at the Southern Research Station in cooperation with the North Carolina Forest Service. Data estimates are based on field data collected using the FIA annualized sample design and are updated yearly. The estimates presented in this update are for the measurement year 2015 with comparisons made to data reported in 2013 (the latest 5-year analytical report for the State).

Castanea dentata (American chestnut) persists today in the southern Appalachian forests of North Carolina as sparsely occurring sprouting root systems. The introduction of two exotic fungal diseases into North America, root rot (Phytophthora cinnamomi) in the early 1800s and chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) in the early 1900s, eliminated C. dentata as a dominant canopy species. Identifying and understanding the characteristics of sites where C. dentata persists could offer insights for management and restoration. Using a regional forest inventory and analysis (FIA) database, I...