Treesearch

Temperate rainforests are the most carbon dense forest ecosystem on the planet, with C stocks several times higher than most other forested biomes. While climatic and disturbance drivers of these C stocks are relatively well explored, the spatial distribution of those stocks at the scale of entire watersheds is less well known, particularly in perhumid rainforests where research has been minimal. This study explored biomass distributions across an entire watershed simultaneously, from ocean to glacial icefields, in Southeast Alaska. Utilizing LiDAR and ground surveys, biomass was modelled...

This document provides a summary of the current state of knowledge regarding Ceratocystis-induced Rapid Ohia Death and an initial presentation and analysis of the options to manage the disease. It also provides essential background information for use in development and refinement of a response plan.

New and previously unimaginable Landsat applications have been fostered by a policy change in 2008 that made analysis-ready Landsat data free and open access. Since 1972, Landsat has been collecting images of the Earth, with the early years of the program constrained by onboard satellite and ground systems, as well as limitations across the range of required computing, networking, and storage capabilities. Rather than robust on-satellite storage for transmission via high bandwidth downlink to a centralized storage and distribution facility as with Landsat-8, a network of receiving stations,...

Spatially explicit maps of wildlife habitat relationships have proven to be valuable tools for conservation and management applications including evaluating how and which species may be impacted by large scale climate change, ongoing fragmentation of habitat, and local land-use practices. Studies have turned to remote sensing datasets as a way to characterize vegetation for the examination of habitat selection and for mapping realized relationships across the landscape. Potentially one of the more difficult habitat types to try to characterize with remote sensing are the vertically and...

Peanut hull residues were considered for the manufacturing of particleboards. Various concentrations of two types of adhesive—polymeric diphenylmethane diisocyanate (MDI) and urea-formaldehyde (UF)—were separately combined with four types of peanut hull particles (fine, mixed, coarse particles, and peanut hull powder) to manufacture particleboards with a certain target density. The confidence level of the effect of the selected production parameters on the physical and mechanical properties of the panels was evaluated. The results showed that increasing the adhesive mass percentage...

Illegal logging and the illegal timber trade are major problems domestically and internationally, threatening not just individual species, but entire ecosystems. The negative impacts are diverse, causing untold environmental, social and economic damage. Illegal timber trade fuels forest degradation and deforestation, causes harm to local communities, and deprives producer countries of billions of dollars in revenue.

As human activity and climate variability alter the movement of water through the environment the need to better understand hydrologic cycle responses to these changes has grown. A reasonable starting point for gaining such insight is studying changes in streamflow given the importance of streamflow as a source of renewable freshwater. Using a wavelet assisted method we analyzed trends in the magnitude of annual scale streamflow variability from 967 watersheds in the continental U.S. (CONUS) over a 70 year period (1940–2009). Decreased annual variability was the dominant pattern at the...

The remainder of the 21st century will present significant challenges for forest watershed management, as rapid and compounded environmental, economic and social change contribute to an increasingly uncertain future. Many of these changes portend a growing risk of water scarcity for a growing human population and greater vulnerability to extreme droughts and more intense storms. Forest hydrological science has a strong tradition of providing the information required for restoring and managing disturbed and stressed landscapes, positioning the field well to guide management to provide...

Disturbance shapes plant communities over a wide variety of spatial and temporal scales. How natural and anthropogenic disturbance interact to shape ecological communities is highly variable and begs a greater understanding. We used five censuses spanning the years 1990–2011 from the 16-ha Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot (LFDP) in northeast Puerto Rico to investigate the interplay of human land-use legacies dating to the early 20th century and two recent hurricanes (Hugo, 1989 and Georges, 1998). The LFDP is a landscape mosaic comprised of an area of mature subtropical wet forest and three...

Inferences for forest-related spatial problems can be enhanced using remote sensing-based maps constructed with nearest neighbours techniques. The non-parametric k-nearest neighbours (k-NN) technique calculates predictions as linear combinations of observations for sample units that are nearest in a space of auxiliary variables to population units for which predictions are desired. Implementations of k-NN require four choices: a distance or similarity metric, the specific auxiliary variables to be used with the metric, the number of nearest neighbours, and a scheme for weighting the...