Treesearch

It has been 5 years since the High Park Fire burned over 85,000 acres in Northern Colorado, causing extensive property damage, loss of life, and severe impacts to the water quality of the Poudre River. In the fall of 2016, a conference was organized by the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station and the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed to discuss what has been learned about our response to the fire. Topics covered (and discussed in this article) included how treatment areas were prioritized; the main effects of the High Park fire; the effectiveness of postfire treatments, and where to...

The Research and Development (R&D) Wildland Fire and Fuels program at the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, continues to be an internationally renowned program for generating critical and essential data, knowledge, and applications for all phases of wildland fire management and response. This report provides a primer on the breadth and depth of Forest Service wildland fire and fuels R&D and synthesizes the robust and diverse body of recent Forest Service fire research in the context of outcomes that have improved the wildland fire management and response in...

Forest and grassland ecosystems in the United States play a critical role in the global carbon cycle, and land management activities influence their ability to absorb and sequester carbon. These ecosystems provide a critical regulating function, offsetting about 12 to 19 percent of the Nation's annual greenhouse gas emissions. Forests and grasslands are managed for many different objectives and a variety of goods and services, including clean water, clean air, biodiversity, wood products, wildlife habitat, food, recreation, and carbon sequestration. Although carbon may be of interest in...

All products, including bioproducts, have an impact on the environment by consuming resources and releasing emissions during their production. Biochar, a bioproduct, has received considerable attention because of its potential to sequester carbon in soil while enhancing productivity, thus aiding sustainable supply chain development. In this chapter, the environmental impacts of producing biochar using a holistic method called life-cycle assessment (LCA) or more generally life-cycle analysis are discussed. LCA is an internationally accepted method that can calculate greenhouse gas (GHG) and...

Short rotation Eucalyptus plantations offer great potential for increasing wood-fiber production in the southern United States. Eucalyptus plantations can be highly productive (>35 m3 ha
1 year
1), but they may use more water than intensively managed pine (primarily Pinus taeda L.) plantations. This has raised concern about how expansion of Eucalyptus plantations will affect water resources. We compared tree water use, stem growth, and WUE (kg wood per m3 water transpired) in adjacent nine-year-old Eucalyptus benthamii and P. taeda plantations with similar stand density and leaf area. Sap...

Biochar may be useful for restoring or revitalizing degraded forest soils and help with carbon sequestration, nutrient leaching losses, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, biochar is not currently widely used on forested lands across North America. This chapter provides an overview of several biochar experiments conducted in North America and discusses the feasibility of using in-woods mobile pyrolysis systems to convert excess forest biomass into biochar. Biochar may be applied to forest sites in order to positively influence soil properties (nutrient leaching, water holding...

Buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare or Cenchrus ciliaris) is a perennial grass that has become highly invasive in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. In the search for novel control strategies against this weed, strains of the foliar fungal pathogen Cochliobolus australiensis from buffelgrass have been screened for their ability to produce phytotoxic metabolites that could potentially be used as natural herbicides in an integrated pest management strategy. A new phytotoxin, named cochliotoxin, was isolated from liquid culture of this fungus together with radicinin, radicinol, and their...

Fire is a driving force in the North American landscape and predicting post-fire tree mortality is vital to land management. Post-fire tree mortality can have substantial economic and social impacts, and natural resource managers need reliable predictive methods to anticipate potential mortality following fire events. Current fire mortality models are limited to a few species and regions, notably Pinus ponderosa and Pseudotsuga menziesii in the western United States. The efficacy of existing mortality models to predict fire-induced tree mortality is central to effective forest management....

Biochar systems are designed to meet four related primary objectives: improve soils, manage waste, generate renewable energy, and mitigate climate change. Supply chain models provide a holistic framework for examining biochar systems with an emphasis on product life cycle and end use. Drawing on concepts in supply chain management and engineering, this chapter presents biochar as a manufactured product with a wide range of feedstocks, production technologies, and end use options. Supply chain segments are discussed in detail using diverse examples from agriculture, forestry and other...

On June 1, 2015, the Forest Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Branch of Research. Established in 1915 to centralize and elevate the pursuit of research throughout the agency, the Branch of Research focused on everything from silvicultural investigations conducted by the experiment stations to industrial studies and wood product improvement at the Madison, WI, Forest Products Laboratory. From its beginning, the branch oversaw ongoing research designed to develop insights, methods, and technologies to help foresters and...