Treesearch

The U.S. Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program conducts the National Woodland Owner Survey in order to better understand: who owns America's forests, why they own it, what they have done with it in the past, and what they intend to do with it in the future. This document summarizes data on family forest ownerships with 10+ acres in Vermont. These summaries are based on responses from randomly selected landowners from across Vermont collected between 2011 and 2013 (n=440). For explanations of the numbers and gures below, underlying summary tables, additional results, de...

Rural landscapes face changing climate, shifting development pressure, and loss of agricultural land. Perennial bioenergy crops grown on existing agricultural land may provide an opportunity to conserve rural landscapes while addressing increased demand for biofuels. However, increased bioenergy production and changing land use raise concerns for tradeoffs within the food–energy–environment trilemma. Heterogeneity of climate, soils, and land use complicate assessment of bioenergy potential in complex landscapes, creating challenges to evaluating future tradeoffs. The hypothesis addressed...

Fire suppression and logging have contributed to major changes in California’s Sierra Nevada forests. Strategically placed landscape treatments (SPLATS) are being used to reduce density of trees, shrubs, and surface fuels to limit wildfire intensity and spread, but may negatively impact fishers (Pekania pennanti). We used camera traps to survey for fishers among 1-km2 grid cells of forest habitat in the Sierra National Forest, California. We used single-season (n = 894 cells) and multi-season (n = 361 cells) occupancy modeling to evaluate responses of fishers to fuel reduction in the 5...

Mesophytic species (esp. Acer rubrum) are increasingly replacing oaks (Quercus spp.) in fire-suppressed, deciduous oak-hickory forests of the eastern US. A pivotal hypothesis is that fuel beds derived from mesophytic litter are less likely than beds derived from oak litter to carry a fire and, if they do, are more likely to burn at lower intensities. Species effects, however, are confounded by topographic gradients that affect overstory composition and fuel bed decomposition. To examine the separate and combined effects of litter species composition and topography on surface fuel beds, we...

The U.S. Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program conducts the National Woodland Owner Survey in order to better understand: who owns America's forests, why they own it, what they have done with it in the past, and what they intend to do with it in the future. This document summarizes data on family forest ownerships with 10+ acres in Texas. These summaries are based on responses from randomly selected landowners from across Texas collected between 2011 and 2013 (n=444). For explanations of the numbers and gures below, underlying summary tables, additional results, de nitions,...

This document provides explanations of the data sources, graphics, and summaries presented in the 41 national, regional, and state National Woodland Owner Survey 2011-2013 two-page research note summary reports (Research Note NRS-206 through Research Note NRS-246). All of these research notes can be accessed at www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/.

Research has shown there is a positive relationship between urban greenness and the well-being of cityresidents. But greenness is often unevenly distributed across a city, raising environmental justice issues.In 2011 and 2012 the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program installed ground plotsin the urbanized areas of Oregon and Washington. We analyze these data for the urban areas west of theCascade Mountains, linking it with demographic data from the U.S. Census to examine the relationshipbetween greenness and socioeconomic status at a sub-regional scale. To explore some...

Small trees and shrubs play an important role in forest diversity and regeneration and may contribute substantially to ecosystem fluxes of carbon and water; however, relatively little attention is given to quantifying the contribution of small trees to forest processes. One reason for this may be that the allometric equations developed for large trees tend to systematically underestimate structural variables such as biomass and foliage area when applied to small trees, both on an individual tree level and at the stand level. To test this hypothesis, we developed allometric equations for...

In mountainous areas such as the southern Appalachians USA, riparian zones are difficult to define. Vegetation is a commonly used riparian indicator and plays a key role in protecting water resources, but adequate knowledge of floristic responses to riparian disturbances is lacking. Our objective was to quantify changes in stand-level floristic diversity of riparian plant communities before (2004) and two, three, and seven years after shelterwood harvest using highlead cable-yarding and with differing no-cut buffer widths of 0 m, 10 m, and 30 m distance from the stream edge. An unharvested...

The third full annual inventory of Minnesota forests reports 17.4 million acres of forest land with an average live tree volume of 1,096 cubic feet per acre. Forest land is dominated by the aspen forest type, which occupies 29 percent of the total forest land area. Twenty-eight percent of forest land consists of sawtimber, 35 percent poletimber, 36 percent sapling/seedlings, and 1 percent is nonstocked. The average annual net growth of live trees on forest land is approximately 398 million cubic feet per year while average annual removals are only 207 million cubic feet per year. Additional...