Treesearch

In the eastern United States, American chestnut (Castanea dentata) was historically a major component of forest communities, but was functionally extirpated in the early 20th century by an introduced pathogen, chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica). Because chestnut is fast-growing, long-lived, and resistant to decay, restoration of American chestnut using blight-resistant stock could have the potential to increase carbon sequestration or storage in forested landscapes. However, carbon dynamics are also affected by interspecific competition, succession, natural disturbance, and forest...

Planting trees to mark the passing of events and people is a longstanding tradition around the world. To better understand the contemporary practices of memorialization through planting, we examine living memorials created in response to the events of September 11, 2001. As an extension of the U.S. Forest Service Living Memorials Project, we reviewed existing data (n = 787 sites) and identified 223 sites where stewards mentioned planting 102 kinds of flora. Oaks (Quercus spp.) were most commonly mentioned (17% of sites), while 75% of plants/trees were named at only 1% or fewer sites,...

The Cutting Practice Level study is the longest running study on the Penobscot EF, with over 60 years of continuous measurement data. Studies of this nature provide the unique opportunity to examine long-term forest dynamics and explore outcomes not usually visible on shorter term studies.

Understanding forest structural changes resulting from postdisturbance management practices such as salvage logging is critical for predicting forest recovery and developing appropriate management strategies. In 2013, a tornado and subsequent salvage operations in northern Maine, USA, created three conditions (i.e., treatments) with contrasting forest structure: blowdown, blowdown + salvage, and control (undisturbed). We sampled forest structure in five stands representing each of these three treatments. Our results document obvious and predictable changes to forest structure caused by the...

The Community Biomass Handbook Volume 4: Enterprise Development for Integrated Wood Manufacturing is a guide for creating sustainable business enterprises using small diameter logs and biomass. This fourth volume is a companion to three Community Biomass Handbook volumes: Volume 1: Thermal Wood Energy; Volume 2: Alaska, Where Woody Biomass Can Work; and Volume 3: How Wood Energy is Revitalizing Rural Alaska. This volume is designed to help business partnerships, forest managers, and community groups rapidly explore and evaluate integrated manufacturing opportunities. The handbook is...

Windbreaks are an important ecological resource across the large expanse of agricultural land in the central United States and are often planted in straight-line or L-shaped configurations to serve specific functions. As high-resolution (i.e., <5 m) land cover datasets become more available for these areas, semi-or fully-automated methods for distinguishing windbreaks from other patches of trees are needed for use with thematic raster datasets. To address this need, we created three shape indexes: a morphology-based index that we have named the Straight and Narrow Feature Index (SNFI), a...

Wildfires in the eastern United States are generally caused by humans in locations where human development and natural vegetation intermingle, e.g. the wildland–urban interface (WUI). Knowing where wildfire hazards are elevated across the forested landscape may help land managers and property owners plan or allocate resources for potential wildfire threats. In an earlier paper, we presented a model showing monthly hazards of wildfire across Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey at a 30-m resolution. Here, we refine the spatial resolution of drought conditions by incorporating a 4 × 4-km...

The eighth inventory of Michigan's forests, completed in 2014, describes more than 20.3 million acres of forest land. The data in this report are based on visits to 4,289 forested plots from 2009 to 2014. Timberland accounts for 95 percent of this forest land, and 62 percent is privately owned. The sugar maple/beech/yellow birch forest type accounts for 19 percent of the State's forest land, followed by aspen (12 percent) and white oak/red oak/hickory (7 percent). Balsam fir, red maple, and sugar maple are the three most common species by number of trees. Growing-stock volume on timberland...

Dispersal can strongly influence the demographic and evolutionary trajectory of populations. For many species, little is known about dispersal, despite its importance to conservation. The Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is a species of conservation concern that ranges across 11 western U.S. states and 2 Canadian provinces. To investigate dispersal patterns among spring breeding congregations, we examined a 21-locus microsatellite DNA dataset of 3,244 Greater Sage-Grouse sampled from 763 leks throughout Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, USA, across 7 yr. We...