Treesearch

Effective bird conservation planning requires consideration of year-round habitat requirements. We evaluated how bird communities differed across seasons, and between young shelterwood (SW) and unmanaged mature (M) hardwood forests over 8 years. We detected 3952 individuals of 82 bird species within transects. Total abundance, richness, and diversity were highest in summer and lowest in winter. Richness was greater in SW than M during all seasons; abundance and diversity were greater in SW during summer, fall, and spring. Community composition differed between SW and M during all seasons...

A growing recognition that uneven-aged silviculture can offer multiple benefits to forested ecosystems has encouraged some landowners in the southern region of the United States to convert even-aged pine stands into multi-aged stands. For shade-intolerant pines of the southern United States, however, few studies have examined residual tree growth following silvicultural treatments that convert even-aged stands to multi-aged stands. Understanding the growth response of residual trees to different kinds of stand conversion treatments is critical to stand development and sustainability, as...

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program collected forest and tree measurements from 149 plots in Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae states of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Of these, 78 were remeasured plots first established in 2005, and 71 were new plots that were established to meet the Micronesia Challenge, a regional conservation initiative. We recorded 131 tree species and 280 dominant vascular plant species, including 18 invasive plant species. Invasive plant species were present in half of FSM forest area, and the...

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program collected forest and tree measurements from 71 plots on 13 atolls and one island (Mejit) of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). Of these, 44 were remeasured plots first established in 2008, and 27 were newly established plots including 17 plots established in cooperation with the Micronesia Challenge program. We recorded a total of 20 tree species and 53 dominant vascular plant species, including three invasive plant species. We inventoried four forest communities (lowland rainforest,...

Kang et al. (2024) present a spatiotemporal analysis of Phytophthora ramorum outbreaks from 2005 to 2021 in the United States and Europe. However, the analysis and conclusions are flawed because of a lack of understanding of the pathosystems analyzed which led the authors to select improper methods for their analysis. The open-source data analyzed does not include sampling over all seasons of the year. Sampling is primarily conducted in the spring which makes the data unbalanced and inappropriate for examination of seasonality without transformation. Differences in characteristics, and...

We conducted a census of the 2020 Washington forest products industry. We asked any facility that purchased roundwood or purchased residuals from roundwood users about their mill characteristics, employment, inputs, outputs, residual production and disposition, and sales value. We also collected data from facilities in surrounding states that purchased roundwood from Washington. We identified 83 primary processing facilities, nearly 3 billion board feet Scribner of timber harvest, and more than 4 billion bone-dry units of generated residuals. We compared the census results to similar...

While there is near unanimous agreement that for tourism to be considered sustainable, residents need to be empowered, few researchers have asked residents which dimensions of empowerment should be prioritized. This research seeks to fill this gap and give residents a voice in sharing their empowerment priorities by conducting an Importance Performance Analysis using the Resident Empowerment through Tourism Scale within the nature-based tourism destination of Brevard, located in Transylvania County, NC, USA. Results found residents to be generally apathetic towards empowerment, with...

Tree spacing during reforestation is a critical decision that influences the trajectory and rate of stand development over time, but there is limited quantification of responses at meaningful time scales for management. Here we report on ∼40 year response of coast Douglas-fir (DF, Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii), noble fir (NF, Abies procera) and western white pine (WWP, Pinus monticola) to five or six spacing treatments that ranged from 1 to 6 m in the western Cascades of Washington, USA. Spacing effects were tested separately for each species in completely randomized designs...

Recent climate and disturbance conditions in Western U.S. forests have led to significant reforestation needs, necessitating the development of climate-informed management strategies. Promising adaptation strategies include assisted population migration, the movement of seed sources or populations to new locations within the historical species range, combined with silvicultural establishment practices that can improve short-term seedling survival and longer term stand resilience to future climate. Presently, there are challenges to the operational use of assisted population migration and...

Multiple studies have found that exposure to greenspace during pregnancy is associated with increased birthweight (Hu et al., 2021) and a reduced probability of a small-for-gestational-age birth. However, because exposure to greenspace is associated with demographic correlates of health, studies may suffer from residual confounding. In addition, results may be influenced by the self-selection of healthier women into greener neighborhoods. We address these limitations by using the number of trees planted around maternal address as a novel exposure metric. Compared to existing tree cover,...