Treesearch

Coastal indigenous people around the world have depended on natural resources from land and sea since time immemorial. However, assessments of potential resource change resulting from ongoing physical change, like we are experiencing today, are rare. Such summaries could increase our understanding of ecosystem dynamics and implications for important resources and could guide land use policies meant to sustain important resources.

Ecosystem services are increasingly recognized as a way of framing and describing the broad suite of benefits that people receive from forests. The USDA Forest Service has been exploring use of an ecosystem services framework to describe forest values provided by federal lands and to attract and build partnerships with stakeholders to implement projects. Recently, the agency has sought placed-based applications of the ecosystem services framework to national forest management to better illustrate the concept for policymakers, managers and forest stakeholders. This framework includes...

The science of ecology fundamentally aims to understand species and their relation to the environment. At sites where hurricane disturbance is part of the environmental context, permanent forest plots are critical to understand ecological vegetation dynamics through time. An overview of forest structure and species composition from two of the longest continuously measured tropical forest plots is presented. Long-term measurements, 72 years at the leeward site, and 25 years at windward site, of stem density are similar to initial and pre-hurricane values at both sites. For 10 years post-hurr...

Understanding and transforming how cities think is a crucial part of developing effective knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene. In this article, we review knowledge co-production as a popular approach in environmental and sustainability science communities to the generationof useable knowledge for sustainability and resilience. We present knowledge systems analysis as a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding existing co-production processes as preconditions to the design of new knowledge infrastructures in cities. Knowledge systems are the organizational practices...

This resource update provides an overview of timber product output (TPO) and use in North Dakota based on questionnaires designed to determine the size and composition of the State's primary wood-using industry, its use of roundwood, and its generation and disposition of wood residues. This study was a cooperative effort between the North Dakota Forest Service (NDFS) and the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program at the Northern Research Station (NRS) of the U.S. Forest Service. The NDFS surveys all known primary woodusing mills and FIA processes and analyzes the survey responses....

Sap-sucking insects typically engage in obligate relationships with symbiotic bacteria that play nutritional roles in synthesizing nutrients unavailable or in scarce supply from the plant-sap diets of their hosts. Adelgids are sap-sucking insects with complex life cycles that involve alternation between conifer tree species. While all adelgid species feed on spruce during the sexual phase of their life cycle, each adelgid species belongs to a major lineage that feeds on a distinct genus of conifers as their alternate host. Previous work on adelgid symbionts had discovered pairs of symbionts...

The central, unglaciated US east of the Great Plains to the Atlantic coast corresponds to the area covered by LRR N (East and Central Farming and Forest Region) and S (Atlantic Basin Diversified Farming Region). These regions roughly correspond to the Interior Highlands, Interior Plains, Appalachian Highlands, and the Northern Coastal Plains.

Increasingly, forest managers intend to create or maintain mixed Pinus-hardwood stands. This stand assemblage may be driven by a variety of objectives but is often motivated by the desire to enhance native forest diversity and promote resilience to perturbations. Documenting the effects of natural disturbances on species composition and stand structure, and thus successional and developmental pathways, in stands with these mixtures is essential to achieve these goals. The specific objectives of this study were to quantify and compare the impacts of an intermediate-severity canopy disturbanc...

Native American forests and tribal forest management practices have sustained indigenous communities, economies, and resources for millennia. These systems provide a wealth of knowledge and successful applications of long-term environmental stewardship and integrated, sustainable forest management. Tribal forestry has received an increasing amount of attention from forest managers, academics, and tribal communities in recent years. Tribal forestry is seen as a way to provide approaches for solving our most complex social, economic, and environmental issues facing natural resource managers...

Wood-based bioenergy in the US South is a key element in a sociotechnical imaginary that brings together rural development, energy independence, and environmental sustainability; it is also a key element in another imaginary in which powerful interest groups from the private sector and government collude in ways that enrich them regardless of success of the endeavor, while simultaneously posing risks to the host community. We contend that bioenergy development can introduce new risks for local communities that are often overlooked in imaginaries promulgating bioenergy as a driver of...