Treesearch

The fungus Raffaelea quercus-mongolicae is the causal agent of Korean oak wilt, a disease associated with mass mortality of oak trees (e.g., Quercus spp.). The fungus is vectored and dispersed by the ambrosia beetle, Platypus koryoensis. Here, we present the 27.0-Mb draft genome sequence of R. quercus-mongolicae strain KACC44405.

The impacts of wildfires have increased in recent decades because of historical forest and fire management, a rapidly changing climate, and an increasingly populated wildland urban interface. This increasingly complex fire environment highlights the importance of developing robust tools to support risk-informed decision making. While tools have been developed to aid fire management, few have focused on large-fire management and those that have typically simplified the decision environment such that they are not operationally relevant. Additionally, fire managers need to be able to evaluate...

Sediment recovery following disturbances is a measure of the time required to attain pre-disturbance sediment fluxes. Insight into the controls on recovery processes and pathways builds understanding of geomorphic resilience.We assess post-disturbance sediment recovery in three small (1.5-100 km2), largely unaltered watersheds within the northern Colorado RockyMountains affected by wildfires, floods, and debris flows. Disturbance regimes span 102 (floods, debris flows) to 103 years (wildfires). For all case studies, event sediment recovery followed a nonlinear pattern: initial high...

A changing climate, changing development and land use patterns, and increasing pressures on ecosystem services raise global concerns over growing losses associated with wildland fires. New management paradigms acknowledge that fire is inevitable and often uncontrollable, and focus on living with fire rather than attempting to eliminate it from the landscape. A notable example from the U.S. is the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, which aims to bring multiple agencies, landowners and stakeholders together to achieve three broadly defined goals: resilient landscapes,...

Many approaches have been developed for measuring or estimating actual evapotranspiration (ETa), and research over many years has led to the development of remote sensing methods that are reliably reproducible and effective in estimating ETa. Several remote sensing methods can be used to estimate ETa at the high spatial resolution of agricultural fields and the large extent of river basins. More complex remote sensing methods apply an analytical approach to ETa estimation using physically based models of varied complexity that require a combination of ground-based and remote sensing data,...

A longer growing season with climate change is expected to increase net primary productivity of many rangeland types, especially those dominated by grasses, although responses will depend on local climate and soil conditions. Elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide may increase water use efficiency and productivity of some species. In many cases, increasing wildfire frequency and extent will be damaging for big sagebrush and other shrub species that are readily killed by fire. The widespread occurrence of cheatgrass and other nonnatives facilitates frequent fire through annual fuel accumulation...

Previous research has shown that large secondary wood manufacturers request numerous product-related services from their hardwood lumber suppliers. In addition, large secondary manufacturers also source more of their lumber directly from hardwood sawmills than do smaller secondary manufacturers, which tend to purchase more lumber from distributors. Current trends in the U.S. hardwood industry suggest that secondary manufacturers are becoming larger in size and more concentrated (excluding the wood household furniture sector), a reversal of a trend toward smaller size during the Great...

Trees provide important health, ecosystem, and aesthetic services in urban areas, but they are unevenly distributed. Some neighborhoods have abundant tree canopy and others nearly none. We analyzed how neighborhood characteristics and changes in income over time related to the distribution of urban tree canopy in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD. We used stepwise multiple regression analysis to identify strong predictors of UTC, from variables found in neighborhoods with different patterns of wealth-stability over time. We then built spatial lag models to predict variation in UTC cover,...

This report summarizes results from the 2011-2013 National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS) conducted by the U.S. Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program for family forest ownerships with forest holdings of 1-9 acres. Summaries are based on responses from 1,025 family ownerships with 1-9 acres of forest across 39 U.S. states. Survey summary tables are provided for the nation and three regions (North, South, and West) and are available at https://doi.org/10.2737/NRS-RB-114. To generate reliable statistics, only the 39 states with at least five respondents are included. The survey...

The establishment of exotic invasive species, including plants, has been linked to the decline of some amphibian populations. Of particular concern with invasive plants, from an amphibian conservation perspective, is that they are disproportionately wetland or riparian species. Recent evidence suggests that Chinese tallow (Triadica sebifera), an exotic deciduous tree species, is expanding its range and becoming more abundant where it occurs in the United States. This is particularly relevant to amphibian conservation considering that Chinese tallow tends to invade wetlands, and recent...