Treesearch

In water-limited dryland ecosystems of the Western United States, climate change is intensifying the impacts of heat, drought, and wildfire. Disturbances often lead to increased abundance of invasive species, in part, because dryland restoration and rehabilitation are inhibited by limited moisture and infrequent plant recruitment events. Information on ecological resilience to disturbance (recovery potential) and resistance to invasive species can aid in addressing these challenges by informing long-term restoration and conservation planning. Here, we quantified the impacts of projected...

Co-production, or integrating a range of perspectives from researchers and non-researchers into the knowledge development process, is considered valuable for increasing the potential that scientific results will be applied by practitioners. While the literature around co-production often touts the benefits of such work, there is less focus on the potential costs of co-production, and discussions often lack nuance about the specific meaning of co-production in a particular context. In this perspective essay, we use an example co-production process focused on the development of a science...

1. Cyclonic storms, or hurricanes, are expected to intensify as ocean heat energy rises due to climate change. Ecological theory suggests that tropical forest resistance to hurricanes should increase with forest age and wood density. However, most data on hurricane effects on tropical forests come from a limited number of well-studied long-term monitoring sites, restricting our capacity to evaluate the resistance of tropical forests to hurricanes across broad environmental gradients. 2. In this study, we assessed whether forest age and aridity mediate the effects of hurricanes Irma and...

Urban forests (UF) have been documented as a strategy for mitigating urban heat in population centers of the Global North that are affected by extreme temperatures. However, few have studied this ecosystem service in such climate-vulnerable, humid, tropical cities with less than 50,000 inhabitants, limited resources, and weak adaptive capacity to heatwaves. Accordingly, we studied the tropical city of Puerto Carreño, Colombia, to explore the links between tree heat regulation, human thermal comfort, and the subsequent effects on human well-being during the extremely hot season of 2021....

The frequency of tracts of timber offered for sale that do not receive any bids, also known as no-bids, is a concern for public land managers. No-bids can delay forest management and result in lost revenue to federal and state agencies. We used data collected by the USDA Forest Service (Forest Service) and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (MN DNR) to assess the impact of appraisal adjustments on the appraised value of federal and state timber tracts offered for sale in Minnesota and quantify the impact of appraisal characteristics on the likelihood of a sale. We found that...

The scale of wildfires, in terms of acreage burned and mortality rates, is on the rise due to climate change. There are various causes for wildfire ignition; however, power lines are one of the most significant factors, leading to some of the most devastating wildfire events over the past decade and even bankrupting electric utilities. Traditional insurance strategies are often not applicable for providing financial resilience to electric utilities against such catastrophic events. This paper quantifies the associated risk and proposes a catastrophe bond (CAT bond) as a form of parametric...

This case study conducted a cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA) on the production of hardwood lumber in New Brunswick, Canada, evaluating the environmental impacts from raw material extraction to the point where lumber exited the mill as rough green lumber, the primary input for manufacturing pallets and railway ties. Data on annual production, material flow, and energy use for harvesting and sawmilling were gathered through survey questionnaires and on-site visits. The life cycle inventory (LCI) was developed in SimaPro software, the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) was conducted...

Recovered and recovering carnivore populations in Europe and North America can pose risks to some human livelihoods like livestock ranching. These risks can motivate wildlife managers to lethally remove carnivores—decisions that are often controversial and poorly understood. We used a 13-year dataset on gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the northwestern United States (Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon) to analyze how social, demographic, and environmental variables influence lethal removal of wolves at the county and state levels. We found that state-level differences are a major driver of...

The Forest Products Laboratory NONPAR procedure is explained in mathematical detail and demonstrated with examples. The procedure for constructing confidence intervals is updated from a previous version. Tables listing order statistics representing lower tolerance limits and confidence intervals for the 5th percentile are exhibited for sample sizes up to 5,000.

Although insurance is an important risk management tool in many resource-dependent sectors, its connections to natural resource use are not well understood. We estimate the impact of US federal crop insurance pricing policy on the private use of common pool groundwater in the High Plains region of the United States. Field level panel data on insurance purchases and groundwater extraction allow us to exploit spatial discontinuities in insurance prices at county borders while instrumenting for endogenous prices. A theoretical model describes the mechanisms connecting insurance and resource...