Treesearch

We presented a new information-sharing platform at the 16th Caribbean Foresters Meeting in August 2013 to facilitate and promote collaboration among Caribbean foresters. The platform can be accessed through the Caribbean Foresters website where information and data on forest research sites can be shared. There is a special focus on identifying potential collaborations and sharing data from permanent forest-sample plots in the Caribbean region. This short communication from the Information-Sharing Working Group that convened at the August 2013 meeting presents the first agreement for...

After several years of intense debate surrounding so-called new conservation, there has been a general trend toward reconciliation among previously dissenting voices in the conservation community, a “more is more” mentality premised upon the belief that a greater diversity of conservation approaches will yield greater conservation benefits. However, there seems good reason to remain uneasy about the new conservation platform. We seek to clarify the reasons behind this lingering unease, which we suspect is shared by others in the conservation community, by re-examining new conservation...

In hedonic valuation studies the policy-relevant environmental quality attribute of interest is often costly to measure, especially under pronounced spatial and temporal variability. However, in many cases this attribute affects home prices and consumer preferences solely through its impact on a readily observable, spatially delineated, and time-invariant feature of the physical landscape. We label such a feature a “translating amenity.” We show that under certain conditions changes in the marginal effect of such amenities on home values over time can be used to drawinference on the...

Headwater streams comprise nearly 90% of the total length of perennial channels in global catchments. They mineralize organic carbon entering from terrestrial systems, evade terrestrial carbon dioxide (CO2), and generate and remove carbon through in-stream primary production and respiration. Despite their importance, headwater streams are often neglected in global carbon budgets primarily because of a lack of available data. We measured these processes, in detail, over a 10 year period in a stream draining a 96 ha forested watershed in western Oregon, USA. This stream, which represents...

The epidemic of mortality by insects and disease throughout the Northern American Rocky Mountains exceeds previous records both in severity and spatial extent. Beetle attacks weaken trees and introduce blue-stain fungi that induce hydraulic failure leading to mortality. The magnitude of this outbreak spurs predictions of major changes to biogeochemical cycling and hydrologic response, changes in species assemblages, and increased wildfire risk. Review of emerging empirical studies reveals conflicting evidence of changes and limited environmental threats. However, widespread forest mortality...

Aim: Climate changes are anticipated to have pervasive negative effects on biodiversity and are expected to necessitate widespread range shifts or contractions. Such projections are based upon the assumptions that (1) species respond primarily to broad-scale climatic regimes, or (2) that variation in climate at fine spatial scales is less relevant at coarse spatial scales. However, in montane forest landscapes, high degrees of microclimate variability could influence occupancy dynamics and distributions of forest species. Using high-resolution bird survey and under-canopy air temperature...

Forest carbon (C) density varies tremendously across space due to the inherent heterogeneity of forest ecosystems. Variation of forest C density is especially pronounced in mountainous terrain, where environmental gradients are compressed and vary at multiple spatial scales. Additionally, the influence of environmental gradients may vary with forest age and developmental stage, an important consideration as forest landscapes often have a diversity of stand ages from past management and other disturbance agents. Quantifying forest C density and its underlying environmental determinants in...

Climate change is predicted to cause widespread declines in biodiversity, but these predictions are derived from coarse-resolution climate models applied at global scales. Such models lack the capacity to incorporate microclimate variability, which is critical to biodiversity microrefugia. In forested montane regions, microclimate is thought to be influenced by combined effects of elevation, microtopography, and vegetation, but their relative effects at fine spatial scales are poorly known. We used boosted regression trees to model the spatial distribution of fine-scale, under-canopy air...

High-resolution biogenic and geologic proxies in which one increment or layer is formed per year are crucial to describing natural ranges of environmental variability in Earth's physical and biological systems. However, dating controls are necessary to ensure temporal precision and accuracy; simple counts cannot ensure that all layers are placed correctly in time. Originally developed for tree-ring data, crossdating is the only such procedure that ensures all increments have been assigned the correct calendar year of formation. Here, we use growth-increment data from two tree species, two...

Laurel wilt, caused by Raffaelea lauricola T.C.Harr., Aghayeva, & Fraedrich, a fungal symbiont of the redbay ambrosia beetle (Xyleborus glabratus Eichhoff), is responsible for extensive mortality of redbay (Persea borbonia (L.) Spreng) and other Lauraceae native to the United States (Fraedrich et al. 2008). The beetle and fungus were introduced into the United States near Savannah, GA, from Asia around 2000, and since then the disease has been spreading rapidly through the southern United States. In March 2015 dead and dying redbay trees were observed in Hardin County, TX, in an area...