Treesearch

Forest managers in the United States must respond to the need for climate-adaptive strategies in the face of observed and projected climatic changes. However, there is a lack of on-the-ground forest adaptation research to indicate what adaptation measures or tactics might be effective in preparing forest ecosystems to deal with climate change. Natural resource managers in many areas are also challenged by scant locally or regionally relevant information on climate projections and potential impacts. The Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) project was designed to respond to these...

Restoring forest landscapes is critical in the face of continued global forest loss and degradation. In this article, weexplore some challenges underlying the delivery of global commitments to restore forest landscapes. We propose that threefundamental questions need to be resolved upfront for the effective implementation of Forest Landscape Restoration andrelated commitments: (1) What social and ecological landscape objectives are being sought through Forest LandscapeRestoration? (2) How are specific areas being selected for restoration? (3) How is success measured when restoring forestlan...

Forest managers are challenged with meeting numerous demands that often include wildlife habitat and carbon (C) sequestration. We used a probabilistic framework of wildfire occurrence to (1) estimate the potential for fuel treatments to reduce fire risk and hazard across the landscape and within protected California spotted owl (Strix occidentalis occidentalis) habitat and (2) evaluate the consequences of treatments with respect to terrestrial C stocks and burning emissions. Silvicultural and prescribed fire treatments were simulated on 20% of a northern Sierra Nevada landscape in three...

Climate change is expected to affect air temperature and watershed hydrology, but the degree to which these concurrent changes affect stream temperature is not well documented in the tropics. How stream temperature varies over time under changing hydrologic conditions is difficult to isolate from seasonal changes in air temperature. Groundwater and bank storage contributions to stream flow (i.e., base flow) buffer water temperatures against seasonal and daily fluctuations in solar radiation and air temperature while rainfall-driven runoff produces flooding events which also influence...

Juglans L. (walnuts and butternuts) is an economically and ecologically important genus in the family Juglandaceae. All Juglans are important nut and timbertrees. Juglans regia (Common walnut), J. sigillata (Iron walnut), J. cathayensis (Chinese walnut), J. hopeiensis (Ma walnut), and J. mandshurica (Manchurian walnut are native to or naturalized in China. A strongly supported phylogeny of these five species is not available due to a lack of informative molecular markers. We compared complete chloroplast genomes and determined the phylogenetic relationships among the five Chinese Juglans...

The second full annual inventory of New Jersey’s forests reports more than 2.0 million acres of forest land and 77 tree species. Forest land is dominated by oak/hickory forest types in the north and pitch pine forest types in the south. The volume of growing stock on timberland has been rising since 1956 and currently totals 3.3 billion cubic feet. Average annual net growth of growing stock from 2008 to 2013 was about 65.7 million cubic feet per year. This report includes additional information on forest attributes, land-use change, carbon, timber products, and forest health. The following...

Conservation and restoration of ecosystems impacted by nonnative ungulates increasingly involves their removal and exclusion. While the influence of nonnative ungulate removal on plant communities is commonly monitored, impacts on underlying ecological processes are seldom quantified. Here we examined how nonnative feral pig (Sus scrofa) removal from Hawaiian tropical montane wet forests affects soil physical and chemical properties. Unique to this study, measurements were taken in paired sites inside and outside of five feral pig removal units representing a ~20 year, highly constrained...

Wildfire risk assessment is increasingly being adopted to support federal wildfire management decisions in the United States. Existing decision support systems, specifically the Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS), provide a rich set of probabilistic and risk‐based information to support the management of active wildfire incidents. WFDSS offers a wide range of decision‐support components, including fire behavior modeling, fire weather information, air quality and smoke management, economics, organization assessment, and risk assessment. Here we focus on WFDSS’s provision of...

Seeds of the winter annual Bromus tectorum lose primary dormancy in summer and are poised to germinate rapidly in the autumn. If rainfall is inadequate, seeds remain ungerminated and may enter secondary dormancy under winter conditions. We quantified conditions under which seeds enter secondary dormancy in the laboratory and field and also examined whether contrasting B. tectorum genotypes responded differently to dormancy induction cues. The study also extends previous hydrothermal time models for primary dormancy loss and germination timing in B. tectorum by using similar models to...

Dendroclimatic research has long assumed a linear relationship between tree-ring increment and climate variables. However, ring width frequently underestimates extremely wet years, a phenomenon we refer to as ‘wet bias’. In this paper, we present statistical evidence for wet bias that is obscured by the assumption of linearity. To improve tree-ring-climate modeling, we take into account wet bias by introducing two modified linear regression models: a linear spline regression (LSR) and a likelihood-based wet bias adjusted linear regression (WBALR), in comparison with a quadratic regression...