Treesearch

Forest management activities that are intended to improve forest health and reduce the risk of catastrophic fire generate low-value woody biomass, which is often piled and open-burned for disposal. This leads to greenhouse gas emissions, long-lasting burn scars, air pollution, and increased risk of escaped prescribed fire. Converting low-value biomass into biochar can be a promising avenue for advancing forest sustainability and carbon neutrality. Biochar can be produced either in a centralized facility or by using place-based techniques that mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and generate...

This illustrated guide provides background information and guidance to help resource management professionals and land managers identify habitat restoration sites that have been affected by introduced root-rotting Phytophthora species. Restoration sites have become persistently infested with soilborne Phytophthora species by the planting of nursery stock with Phytophthora root rot. These infestations can spread beyond planted material into adjoining native vegetation, resulting in expanding areas of plant decline and mortality. Root-rotting Phytophthora species decay fine roots and may...

Wildfires and other disturbances play a fundamental role in regenerating lodgepole pine forests. Though severe, stand-replacing fires are typical of this ecosystem, they can have dramatic impacts on soil properties and biogeochemical processes that influence the rate and composition of vegetation recovery. Organic soil amendments are often applied to manage post-fire erosion, but they can also improve soil moisture and nutrient retention and potentially alter the trajectory of post-fire revegetation. We compared change in soil nutrients, microbial communities, and understory plant cover...

With increasing frequency and severity, coastal cities are facing the effects of extreme weather events, such as sea-level rise, storm surges, hurricanes, and various types of flooding. Recent urban resilience scholarship suggests that responding to the cascading complexities of climate change requires an understanding of cities as social-ecological-technological systems, or SETS. Advances in data visualization, sensors, and analytics are making it possible for urban planners to gain more comprehensive views of cities. Yet, addressing climate complexity requires more than deploying...

Ecological economics envisions problem-solving collaborative efforts characterized by disciplinary diversity and participants within and outside of research professions. Pursuit of its ambitious vision has led to ambiguity in terms of ecological economics’ paradigms, methodology, and subject matter. There remains a need for comprehensive methodologies and for nuanced discussions of methodological pluralism and action-oriented research practice. We present a pragmatist ecological economics as one foundation to practicing ecological economics. We synthesize the basic normative assumptions of...

Terrestrial vegetation is a crucial component of Earth’s biosphere, regulating global carbon and water cycles and contributing to human welfare. Despite an overall greening trend, terrestrial vegetation exhibits a significant inter-annual variability. The mechanisms driving this variability, particularly those related to climatic and anthropogenic factors, remain poorly understood, which hampers our ability to project the long-term sustainability of ecosystem services. Here, by leveraging diverse remote sensing measurements, we pinpointed 2020 as a historic landmark, registering as the...

Intense precipitation events pose growing threats to forest infrastructure causing flooding, and soil erosion and deposition, creating bottlenecks at road-stream crossing structures (RSCS). We describe a hillslope-scale ensemble hydro-geomorphological vulnerability assessment integrating geospatial Streambank Erosion Vulnerability Assessment (SBEVA), Modified Revised Soil Loss Equation (MRUSLE), and process-based Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model into an ensemble hydro-geomorphologic vulnerability index (EHVI) for USDA Forest Service (USFS) managed 194 road-culverts at the...

Acquiring detailed 3D fuel data for advanced fire models remains challenging, particularly at large scales. To address this need, we present FastFuels, a novel platform designed to generate detailed 3D fuel data and accelerate the use of advanced fire models. FastFuels integrates existing fuel and spatial data with innovative modeling techniques to represent complex 3D fuel arrangements across landscapes. It leverages data sources including the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) database and plot imputation maps, and incorporates advanced features such as data assimilation from LiDAR....

Urban tree canopy (UTC) cover is rarely distributed equitably across social groups, space, and time. Over the past 20 years, research on the social, spatial, and temporal dynamics of UTC has grown considerably as municipalities adopt ambitious tree canopy cover goals. Yet less is known about how these three dimensions of tree canopy intersect. This paper brings these research areas together by examining i) which sets of social variables—population density, socioeconomic status, or lifestyle—are associated with UTC cover on residential lands, ii) how those relationships vary from front to...

What is an old-growth forest? How can it be recognized? And how should old growth be managed? Even after decades of research and thoughtful considerations, these are not easy questions to answer. To aid in this effort, we conducted a search for available literature pertaining to old-growth forests, including historical and current information on its characteristics, scientific articles, dissertations, books, newspaper articles, government reports, and historical photographs of old growth in the Southeastern United States. This search resulted in an annotated compilation of citations...