Treesearch

The 2010 Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment (2010 RPA) reviewed recent trends in wildlife, fish, and biodiversity, showing varied responses, depending on the resource, suggesting varied conditions that depend on region, species group, or habitat type. For this RPA Update, we focused on four topics that were motivated by questions stemming from 2010 RPA findings or that were designed to improve on the resource analysis capability originally reported in the 2010 RPA. First, we extended the work that documented elevated housing growth in the amenity-rich areas near protected areas....

Emerald ash borer (EAB), a beetle from Asia that feeds on ash trees, was discovered as the cause of extensive ash mortality in southeast Michigan and adjacent areas of Canada in 2002. It is thought that this destructive pest was introduced in the early 1990's in infested solid wood packing material originating in Asia. Shortly after EAB was discovered in North America, federal and state regulatory agencies placed infested counties under quarantine and eradication activities were initiated. Due to the magnitude of the EAB infestation in North America, the potential for natural and artificial...

When stressed by low soil water content (SWC) or high vapor pressure deficit (VPD), plants close stomata, reducing transpiration and photosynthesis. However, it has historically been difficult to disentangle the magnitudes of VPD compared to SWC limitations on ecosystem-scale fluxes. We used a 13 year record of eddy covariance measurements from a forest in south central Indiana, USA, to quantify how transpiration and photosynthesis respond to fluctuations in VPD versus SWC. High VPD and low SWC both explained reductions in photosynthesis relative to its long-term mean, as well as reductions...

The frequency and magnitude of extreme events are expected to increase in the future, yet little is known about effects of such events on ecosystem structure and function. We examined how extreme precipitation events affect exports of terrestrial dissolved organic carbon (t-DOC) from watersheds to lakes as well as in-lake heterotrophy in three north-temperate lakes. Extreme precipitation events induced large influxes of t-DOC to our lakes, accounting for 45–58% of the seasonal t-DOC load. These large influxes of t-DOC influenced lake metabolism, resulting in lake net heterotrophy following...

Domestic Hardwood lumber consumption has changed considerably in this century, but how do these changes differ from changes that have occurred over the last 50 years and how have they affected lumber price? In this article, we examine how changes in consumption have influenced aggregate Hardwood lumber prices as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusted for inflation (Fig. 1). For this analysis, we separate consumption into four industrial sectors, furniture (wood household, upholstered household, and office, institutional and custom office millwork), construction and...

Recent soils research has shown that important chemical soil characteristics can change in less than a decade, often the result of broad environmental changes. Repeated sampling to monitor these changes in forest soils is a relatively new practice that is not well documented in the literature and has only recently been broadly embraced by the scientific community. The objective of this protocol is therefore to synthesize the latest information on methods of soil resampling in a format that can be used to design and implement a soil monitoring program. Successful monitoring of forest soils...

The eddy covariance (EC) method is routinely used to measure net ecosystem fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2) and evapotranspiration (ET) in terrestrial ecosystems. It is often desirable to partition CO2 flux into gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (RE), and to partition ET into evaporation and transpiration. We applied multiple partitioning methods, including the recently-developed flux variance similarity (FVS) partitioning method, to a ten-year record of ET and CO2 fluxes measured using EC at Morgan Monroe State Forest, a temperate, deciduous forest located in south-cen...

Within-species hybrid incompatibility can arise when combinations of alleles at more than one locus have low fitness but where possession of one of those alleles has little or no fitness consequence for the carriers. Limited dispersal with small numbers of mate potentials alone can lead to the evolution of clusters of reproductively isolated genotypes despite the absence of any geographical barriers or heterogeneous selection. In this paper, we explore how adding heterogeneous natural selection on the genotypes (e.g., gene environment associations) that are involved in reproductive...

In Montana, USA, there are substantial opportunities for mechanized thinning treatments on public forests to reduce the likelihood of severe and damaging wildfires and improve forest health. These treatments produce residues that can be used to generate renewable energy and displace fossil fuels. The choice modeling method is employed to examine the marginal willingness of Montanans' to pay (MWTP) for woody biomass energy produced from treatments in their public forests. The survey instrument elicited social preferences for important co-benefits and costs of woody biomass energy generation...

Forest biomass is a promising feedstock for the production of bioenergy, biofuels, and bioproducts because it is renewable and widely available as a byproduct of forest management. Its harvest and use also has the potential to positively impact rural communities, especially those negatively impacted by upheaval in the forest sector.