Treesearch

Oak-dominated forests worldwide support high levels of biodiversity and provide many important ecosystem services. However, oak forest sustainability is challenged by unsuccessful recruitment of oaks into the overstory. It is debated whether relatively shade-intolerant oaks can maintain dominance under continuous cover forestry and examples of successful recruitment of oak into the overstory in mixed, uneven-aged forests are rare. This study, set in southern Sweden, investigated the effects of selective cutting on stand structure and oak recruits and how stand density, canopy openness, and...

Climate change may transform peatlands from net carbon (C) sinks to C sources, which could result in a positive feedback to global warming. Warmer temperatures might lower water tables, increase the abundance of shrubs, slow Sphagnum and sedge growth and further accelerate the decomposition of dissolved organic matter (DOM) with a concomitant release of C from the surface. Studies in which vascular plant functional groups (PFGs) in peatlands have been manipulated to mimic the potential effects of a warming climate on DOM are scarce. In the subject study, seasonal effects of PFGs on the...

Hybridization between eastern and western lineages of the biological control agent, Leucotaraxis argenticollis (Zetterstedt) (Diptera: Chamaemyiidae), was demonstrated in the laboratory. The western lineage is abundant on hemlock woolly adelgid, Adelges tsugae Annand (Hemiptera: Adelgidae) in western North America while a genetically distinct eastern lineage feeds mostly on pine adelgids (Hemiptera: Adelgidae: Pineus spp.). Western flies have been released in eastern North America but establishment has not been observed. When reared on A. tsugae in the laboratory, many eastern L. argenticol...

Civic capacity to care for the urban environment is a key factor in urban sustainability efforts. Civic environmental stewardship groups play critical roles in solving governance challenges associated with sustainability, serving as brokers, acting as stewards, advocating for policies, and being repositories of social-ecological memory. Understanding the existing capacity of such groups to create social-ecological outcomes across the urban landscape enables better planning and implementation of equitable nature-based solutions. In this paper, we draw upon existing frameworks of community...

Using Planetscope imagery, we trained a random forest model to detect Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana) throughout a diverse urban landscape in Columbia, Missouri. The random forest model had a classification accuracy of 89.78%, a recall score of 0.693, and an F1 score of 0.819. The key hyperparameters for model tuning were the cutoff and class–weight parameters. After the distribution of Callery pear was predicted throughout the landscape, we analyzed the distribution pattern of the predictions using Ripley’s K and then associated the distribution patterns with various socio-economic...

We conducted a census of all facilities in California that purchase roundwood as well as facilities that purchase residuals from roundwood users. We also collected data from facilities in surrounding states that purchase roundwood from California. We asked facilities about their mill characteristics, employment, inputs, outputs, residual production and disposition, and sales values. In total, we identified 72 facilities in California, accounting for more than 1.6 billion board feet (BBF) Scribner of timber harvest, nearly 2.4 BBF Scribner of lumber and 2.1 million bone-dry units of mill...

The boreal forests of Eurasia form the largest contiguous terrestrial biome in the world, providing numerous ecosystem functions and services for human societies. Temperatures are increasing most rapidly in high northern latitudes, altering tree growth and competition dynamics, and modifying disturbance regimes. The effect of these cumulative changes on the ecosystem functions provided by boreal forests is difficult to predict. We used the process-based LANDIS-II forest landscape model to evaluate how climate change and timber harvesting will interact to alter the production of ecosystem...

California forest land managers seek current information about tree utilization and the volume of merchantable bole wood residue produced by commercial timber harvesting. To address this need, University of Montana, Bureau of Business and Economic Research analysts investigated timber harvest utilization at active logging sites in California from 2018 through 2022. This research characterized current tree utilization, logging operations, and woody biomass left onsite after harvest. Study results were used to compute state-level utilization factors, which indicated that in California, for...

About 40% of the Brazilian Amazon has been deforested or suffered changes in forest structure through degradation (selective logging, fires, and fragmentation). The impact of forest degradation on the forest's sensitivity to climate extremes has not been fully explored because of a lack of data and the complex interplay of forest structure and climate drivers. Here, we combined forest structure data from 545 airborne lidar transects (375 ha each) across the Brazilian Amazon with the Ecosystem Demography Model (ED2). We explore the forest's functional response to near-present (1981–2019)...

The southern Appalachians are a “hotspot” of plant diversity. Herbaceous communities are especially rich in mesic cove hardwood forests, compared to drier upland hardwood forests.We evaluated changes in forest structure and herbaceous plant communities over 17 years in mature cove- (CHM) and upland hardwood (UHM) forests, and young 2-age cove- (CHSW) and upland hardwood (UHSW) stands created by shelterwood-with-reserves regeneration harvests (SW). Structure ofmature forests was relatively static. In contrast, reduced canopy cover after harvests initiated rapid increases in small tree stem...