Treesearch

The challenges posed by observing host-pathogen-environment interactions across large geographic extents and over meaningful time scales limit our ability to understand and manage wildland epidemics. We conducted a landscape-scale, longitudinal study designed to analyze the dynamics of sudden oak death (an emerging forest disease caused by Phytophthora ramorum) across hierarchical levels of ecological interactions, from individual hosts up to the community and across the broader landscape. From 2004 to 2011, we annually assessed disease status of 732 coast live oak, 271 black oak, and 122...

1. Organic matter decomposition is the main process by which carbon (C) is lost from terrestrialecosystems, and mycorrhizal associations of plants (i.e. arbuscular mycorrhizas (AM) and ectomycorrhizas(ECM)) may have different indirect effects on this loss pathway. AM and ECM plants differin the soil decomposers they promote and the quality of litter they produce, which may result indifferent patterns of organic matter decomposition, and hence, soil C loss.2. To determine how mycorrhizal associations indirectly affect decomposer activity, we collectedsoils and litters from four AM and four...

Fire and resource managers of the southern Appalachian Mountains, USA, have many questions about the use of prescribed fire and mechanical treatments to meet various land management objectives. Three common objectives include restoration to an open woodland, oak regeneration, and fuel reduction. This paper provides information about reaching each of these three management objectives by using prescribed burning (B), mechanical fuel reduction (M), and a combination of both fire and mechanical treatment (MB). The southern Appalachian site of the National Fire and Fire Surrogate study has been...

Eglin Air Force Base (AFB) in Florida, in the United States, conserves a large reservoir of native longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) stands that land managers maintain by using frequent fires. We predicted tree density, basal area, and dominant tree species from 195 forest inventory plots, low-density airborne LiDAR, and Landsat data available across the entirety of Eglin AFB. We used the Random Forests (RF) machine learning algorithm to predict the 3 overstory responses via univariate regression or classification, or multivariate k-NN imputation. Ten predictor variables explained ∼...

In the southeastern United States, many forest managers are interested in restoring longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) to upland sites that currently support loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.). We quantified the effects of four canopy treatments (uncut Control; MedBA, harvest to 9 m2·ha−1; LowBA, harvest to 5 m2·ha−1; and Clearcut) and three cultural treatments (NT, no treatment; H, herbicide release of longleaf pine seedlings; and H+F, herbicide release plus fertilization) on resource availability and growing conditions in relation to longleaf pine seedling response for 3 years. Harvesting...

This special issue of Applied Soil Ecology contains the Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on EarthwormEcology (ISEE-10), held in Athens, Georgia, USA in June of 2014. ISEE-10 was attended by 120+ delegates representing 24 nationalities (Fig. 1). The papers collected here represent only a small fraction of the more than 150 oral and poster presentations that were delivered at the Symposium, but these papers still offer the reader a glimpse into the breadth and diversity of topics that were considered in the scientific program. That ISEE has reached its 10th iteration is...

Contact rates vary widely among individuals in socially structured wildlife populations. Understanding the interplay of factors responsible for this variation is essential for planning effective disease management. Feral swine (Sus scrofa) are a socially structured species which pose an increasing threat to livestock and human health, and little is known about contact structure. We analyzed 11 GPS data sets from across the United States to understand the interplay of ecological and demographic factors on variation in co-location rates, a proxy for contact rates. Between-sounder contact...

A flume was used to estimate the carrying capacity of streambed substrates for juvenile steelhead or rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss seeking refuge from simulated freshets. The simulated freshets had mean water column velocities of c. 1·1 m s−1. The number of O. mykiss finding cover within the interstices of the substrate was documented for different substrate sizes and levels of embeddedness. The availability of suitable refuges determined the carrying capacity of the substrate for O. mykiss. For the size of the O. mykiss tested [mean ± S.D. fork length (LF) = 122 ± 12·6 mm], the number...

Catalysis is a fundamental technology that is widely used in the food, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural sectors to produce chemical products on an industrial scale. Well-defined molecular organometallic species are a cornerstone of catalytic methodology, and the activity and selectivity of these complexes can be modulated by judicious choice of metal andsurrounding ligands. Catalysts containing precious metals such as Pd, Rh, Ir, and Ru are typically very efficient, as related reactions require extremely low catalyst loadings. However, precious metals have very limited...