Treesearch

The use of nested plot sizes in forest inventories that encounter a wide range of conditions is relatively common. In straightforward situations, data from the different nested plot sizes are usually combined to create a single plot observation for estimation purposes. However, circumstances may occur where nested plot size estimates are obtained separately and subsequently combined via addition to obtain the final result. In these cases, covariances among the nested plots must be considered in the calculation of estimator variance. However, there are several potential approaches that...

Background: Individual tree attributes such as volume, biomass and carbon mass are widely known to be highly correlated. As these attributes are typically predicted from statistical models, frameworks that provide compatible relationships among these attributes are usually preferred over approaches that provide independent predictions. However, the propagation of model error can be a concern as this compatibility often relies on predictions for one attribute providing the basis for other attributes. In this study, a compatible tree volume, biomass, and carbon prediction system was evaluated...

The Log Recovery Analysis Tool (LORCAT) was developed to enable hardwood sawmill personnel, researchers, and other individuals interested in creating lumber and by-products from logs to examine the impacts of and the relationships among various factors that influence lumber recovery in hardwood mills. LORCAT is a spreadsheet-based tool that was developed for use with either Excel (Microsoft Inc., Redmond, Washington, USA) or LibreOffice (The Document Foundation, Berlin, Germany) spreadsheet applications. LORCAT allows users to interactively view the results from a single log or view trends...

Mechanistic habitat assessment models have long been used for stream fish, especially drift-feeding salmonids. Most of these models assess habitat value as the rate of net energy intake (growth) obtained by a fish feeding in a habitat unit. However, the fitness value of habitat and the willingness of fish to occupy it also depend on predation risk: habitat is not valuable if it offers high growth but also high risk. Methods for modeling how predation risk varies with characteristics of habitat and fish are much less developed than those for modeling net energy intake. We present approaches...

In plant cell walls, lignin, cellulose, and the hemicelluloses form intricate three-dimensional structures. Owing to its complexity, lignin often acts as a bottleneck for the efficient utilization of polysaccharide components as biochemicals and functional materials. A promising approach to mitigate and/or overcome lignin recalcitrance is the qualitative and quantitative modification of lignin by genetic engineering. Feruloyl-CoA 6′-hydroxylase (F6′H1) is a 2-oxoglutaratedependent dioxygenase that catalyzes the conversion of feruloyl-CoA, one of the intermediates of the lignin biosynthetic...

Chirpine (Pinus roxburghii), also known as longleaf Indian pine, is the most tapped pine species in several Asian countries, including Nepal, for its high resin yield. Resin tapping in Chirpine trees has been a longstanding practice in mid-hills of Nepal for the last several decades. This study aimed to evaluate the social impacts of resin tapping from Chirpine forests on the rural socio-ecological dynamics of Nepal’s mid-hills. Using a representative sample of 302 forest users from 20 community forest user groups in three far-western districts, we applied the structural equation modeling...

The reliable measurement of cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) particle morphology is vital for ongoing CNC production optimization and application development. A semi-automatic image analysis program, SMART-AFM, was developed for CNC particle size measurements from atomic force microscopy (AFM) images and subsequently used to analyze the AFM images acquired from four laboratories that participated in the interlaboratory comparison (ILC) study by Bushell et al.. SMART-AFM demonstrated a 40 times faster analysis compared to the manual approach used in the ILC. A detailed image-to-image analysis...

What key characteristics of forest sites and trails contribute to enjoyable and healthy immersive nature experiences for visitors? Previous research has helped identify the conceptual structure and criteria important in facilitating successful experiences, but there remains a knowledge gap in translating this information into operational guidelines. To address this gap, the present work used a descriptive inventory approach combining field research with a variety of secondary data to develop a protocol for assessing four site level criteria (beauty, integrity, tranquility, accessibility)...

The SSN2 R package provides tools for spatial statistical modeling, parameter estimation, and prediction on stream (river) networks. SSN2 is the successor to the SSN R package (Ver Hoef, Peterson, Clifford, & Shah, 2014), which was archived alongside broader changes in the R-spatial ecosystem (Nowosad, 2023) that included 1) the retirement of rgdal (Bivand, Keitt, & Rowlingson, 2021), rgeos (Bivand & Rundel, 2020), and maptools (Bivand & Lewin-Koh, 2021) and 2) the lack of active development of sp (Bivand, Pebesma, & Gómez-Rubio, 2013). SSN2 maintains compatibility with the input data file...

Aim: Fundamental to species conservation efforts is the development of accurate distribution models. Doing so is challenging for many stream organisms, where limited funding may necessitate the compilation of incidental observations from multiple sources which lack an overall sampling design and are often spatially clustered. We demonstrate the application of specialised spatial-stream- network models (SSNMs), which incorporate autocorrelation among observations and have the potential to improve species distribution models for many organisms. Location: Rocky Mountains in west-central North...