Treesearch

The purpose of this research is to analyze thinning response in basal area and height growth of residual loblolly pine trees growing in plantations located in the West Gulf Coastal Plain. Thinning is a well-known silvicultural practice that increases the growing space available to desirable trees by removing competing trees.

The Pax winter storm of February 2014 caused widespread damage to forest stands throughout the southeastern U.S. In a long-term study of savanna plant community restoration at the Savannah River Site, Aiken, SC, precommercial thinning (PCT) of 8- to 11-year-old plantations of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) in 1994 reduced their susceptibility to stem bending and breakage from the storm 20 years later, despite the occurrence of an intensive commercial thinning just two years before the storm. Tree mortality in areas that had received PCT (25 percent) was less than where PCT had not...

Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) seedlings were cultured with air lateral root pruning (side-vented containers, VT) or without (solid-walled containers, SW). Seedling root system morphology and growth were assessed before planting and 8 and 14 months after planting. Although VT seedlings had greater root collar diameter than the SW before planting, seedling height and ground line diameter were not affected by root pruning 14 months after planting. Root pruning did not affect seedling biomass. However, root pruning changed the patterns of biomass allocation. Before planting, VT seedlings...

By the fifth anniversary of the America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative in 2014, the decline in longleaf pine (Pinus palustris L.) appears to have been reversed. The area in longleaf pine-dominated stands currently exceeds 4 million acres, up from a low of about 3 million acres two decades ago. A major contribution to this reversal has been the recent establishment of more than 500,000 acres of longleaf pine plantations. However, the plantation approach has limitations in an environment where stand establishment costs exceed $300 per acre, when large-diameter sawlogs currently bring...

Many longleaf pine stands across the range have suffered decades of fire exclusion, leading to declines in plant and animal biodiversity and complicating restoration and management efforts. Recent research on this topic has focused on the physiological response of overstory longleaf pines and the fuel characteristics of the surrounding forest floor. In small-scale and operational prescribed fires, post-fire pine mortality is tightly linked to basal duff (lowermost fermentation and humus forest floor horizons) consumption and, where present, crown scorch. Pines with substantial duff...

Common walnut (Juglans regia L.) is cultivated in temperate regions worldwide for its wood and nuts. The complete chloroplast genome of J. regia was sequenced using the Illumina MiSeq platform. This is the first complete chloroplast sequence for the Juglandaceae, a family that includes numerous species of economic importance. The chloroplast genome of J. regia was 160 367 bp in length, with 36.11% GC content. It contains a pair of inverted repeats (26 035 bp) which were separated by a large single copy (89 872 bp) and a small single copy region (18 425 bp). A total of 137 genes were...

Red spruce (Picea rubens) and red spruce-northern hardwood mixed stands once covered as much as 300,000 ha in the Central Appalachians, but now comprise no more than 21,000 ha. Recently, interest in restoration of this forest type has increased because red spruce forests provide habitat for a number of rare animal species. Our study reports the results of an understory red spruce release experiment in hardwood-dominated stands that have a small component of understory red spruce. In 2005, 188 target spruce were identified in sample plots at six locations in central West Virginia. We...

The goal of this project is to evaluate the growth and nutritional characteristics of seven forages, including various warm season native grasses, grown under simulated partial shading (50 percent typical of a loblolly pine silvopastoral system in east Texas. The results are from year two of a three year study. In order to meet the overall objective, individual, slatted shade structures were constructed that simulate the quantity, quality, and overall light regime found beneath loblolly pine stands arranged for silvopasture. The forages selected for the study include ‘Tifton 9’ bahiagrass...

Research shows that some categories of human-ignited wildfires may be forecastable, owing to their temporal clustering, with the possibility that resources could be predeployed to help reduce the incidence of such wildfires. We estimated several kinds of incendiary and other human-ignited wildfire forecast models at the weekly time step for tribal land units in the United States, evaluating their forecast skill out of sample. Analyses show that an autoregressive conditional Poisson model of both incendiary and non-incendiary human-ignited wildfires is more accurate out of sample compared...

This report summarizes the results from the 2011-2013 National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS) conducted by the U.S. Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program. The focus of the results reported here is family forest and woodland ownerships with holdings of at least 10 acres. Summaries are based on responses from 8,576 family ownerships with at least 10 acres of forest or woodland across 47 U.S. states. Survey summary tables are available at doi.org/10.2737/NRS-RB-99 and include the 36 states in which the minimum target effective sample size of 100 respondents was obtained plus...