Treesearch

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...

Indigenous agroecological practices have been identified as sustainable place-based practices supporting community resilience and revitalizing biocultural landscapes in Hawaiʻi. In areas where traditional knowledge and practice have been fractured because of colonial practices, new tools, such as spatial modeling, can aid in understanding the distribution of pre-colonial land use. Currently, spatial models of traditional agriculture do not capture the type of systems that supported populations in the Hilo and Puna districts on Hawai‘i Island before European arrival in 1778. We utilized a...

Ammonia (NH3) concentration and flux measurements made in 2016 in a mixed deciduous forest at the western North Carolina Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory are analyzed using a multi-layer, one-dimensional column model with detailed canopy physics and bi-directional exchange. Simulations for April 26–30 and July 19–30 are presented to assess the model's ability to represent measured in-canopy NH3 profiles and probe the processes that control bi-directional exchange with the canopy and forest floor. During dry canopy conditions, model simulations are found to well reproduce measured in-canopy...

A key issue in landscape management, whether public or private, is the mitigation of disturbance events that impact vegetation, ecosystem health, and thus ecosystem services (ESs). Although many studies have found significant tree mortality due to insect infestations, there is still insufficient understanding of how these infestations alter ESs and their associated economic values. Addressing this research gap can assist forest managers and decision-makers in refining and implementing adaptive management practices and policies, while enhancing the resilience of forests and their ESs. We...

We conducted a qualitative literature review and provided a theoretical discussion of how private, common, and public land property rights (LPRs) uniquely influence the effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Service (PES). We considered three aspects of PES’s effectiveness: additionality (PES programs typically employ tests to assess whether the payment will result in additional ecosystem services), socioeconomic impacts, and transaction costs. The existing literature has not addressed differences between LPR types with respect to ensuring additionality. Particularly striking is the lack...

After one year of surveying semiaquatic earthworms (oligochaeta, Sparganophilidae), we describe Sparganophilus jenkinsi sp. nov., S. carveri sp. nov., S. oconeeae sp. nov., S. williamsae sp. nov., S. muskogee sp. nov., S. youngae sp. nov., and S. borgesae sp. nov. based on extensive differences in morphological characters and molecular data. Three additional species are described morphologically but not formally named due to limited material. the species of Sparganophilus described here can be organized into three species groups: (1) S. jenkinsi, S. oconeeae, S. muskogee, S. carveri, S....

Rapid increases in wildfire area burned across North American forests pose novel challenges for managers and society. Increasing area burned raises questions about whether, and to what degree, contemporary fire regimes (1984-2022) are still departed from historical fire regimes (pre-1880). We use the North American tree-ring fire-scar network (NAFSN), a multi-century record comprising >1800 fire-scar sites spanning diverse forest types, and contemporary fire perimeters to ask whether there is a contemporary fire surplus or fire deficit, and whether recent fire years are unprecedented...