Treesearch

Enabled by humans’ ever-expanding trade and travel networks, invasive alien species are crossing borders worldwide at alarming rates (Haack 2006; Haack and Rabaglia 2013; Hulme 2009; Kaluza et al. 2010; Koch et al. 2011; Liebhold et al. 2006; Lodge et al. 2006; Perrings et al. 2005; Pyšek and Richardson 2010; Tatem 2009; Westphal et al. 2008). An astonishing 50,000+ non-native species have been introduced into the U.S. either accidentally or purposefully, and approximately 4,500 of those introductions have been arthropods (Pimentel et al. 2005). Furthermore, new establishments of non-native...

In July 2014, mycelial fans (isolates CO104F, CO106F, and CO108F) of Armillaria sp. were collected from forest trees in Colorado. These isolates were all identified as A. sinapina based on a somatic pairing test against 18 tester isolates representing six North American Armillaria spp. and nucleotide sequences of the translation elongation factor 1alpha (tef-1alpha; GenBank Accession Nos. KT327065, KT327066, and KT327067). Based on nine replications of somatic incompatibility tests, all isolates showed high intraspecific compatibility (colorless antagonism) with three A. sinapina tester...

Understory pine and hardwood regeneration in the Ozark and Ouachita National Forests were measured in 1995 for the first time following thinning and hardwood control at plot establishment 1985-87. Red maple (Acer rubrum), shortleaf pine and flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) were the most frequently recorded species. Understory shortleaf pine stems have declined consistently since 1995. The binomial logistic regression model showed that site index and overstory shortleaf pine basal area were negatively related to shortleaf pine regeneration (P<0.05). Overstory shortleaf pine thinning may...

A semi parametric cox proportion hazard model is preferred when censored data and survival time information is available (Kleinbaum and Klein 1996; Alison 2010). Censored data are observations that have incomplete information related to survival time or event time of interest. In repeated forest measurements, usually observations are either right censored or interval censored. Interval censoring occurs if the exact year of tree death is unknown, since measurement periods are typically longer than one year. Right censoring occurs if tree has not died at the end of the study.

Faced with the challenges of maintaining customer-specified objectives and meeting deadlines, forest land managers must integrate various mensurational information sources for developing management scenarios. Cost efficient measures are a consideration to save both time and money for a client. While inventory data collection is time and money intensive, data processing does not have to be costly. This paper presents an open access, non-fee website that will host several common growth and yield models. The growth and yield web-based system was developed by scientists at Mississippi State...

In 2001, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks) Natural Resources Group created the Forever Wild Program to protect nearly 9,000 acres of forests, wetlands, and meadows citywide. Although these areas were set aside over a decade ago, we have little systematic evidence about how park visitors view, use, and value parks with these resources. In 2013, an interdisciplinary team of scientists and natural resource managers at the New York City Urban Field Station embarked on a study to investigate the social dimensions and value of public green space in New York City....

Differential habitat use and intraguild competition are both thought to be important drivers of animal population sizes and distributions. Habitat associations for individual species are well-established, and interactions between particular pairs of species have been highlighted in many focal studies. However, community-wide assessments of the relative strengths of these two factors have not been conducted. We built multi-scale habitat occupancy models for five carnivore taxa of New York’s Adirondack landscape and assessed the relative performance of these models against ones in which...

Improving management practices in industrial forest plantations may increase production efficiencies, thereby reducing pressures on native tropical forests for meeting global pulp needs. This study aims to predict stem volume (V) in plantations of fast-growing Eucalyptus hybrid clones located in southeast Brazil using field plot and airborne Light Detection andRanging (LiDAR) data. Forest inventory attributes and LiDAR-derived metrics were calculated at 108 sample plots. The best LiDAR-based predictors of V were identified based on loadings calculated from a principal component analysis...

Dung fungi, such as Sordaria fimicola, generally reproduce sexually with ascospores discharged from mammalian dung after passage through herbivores. Their life cycle is thought to be obligate to dung, and thus their ascospores in Quaternary sediments have been interpreted as evidence of past mammalian herbivore activity. Reports of dung fungi as endophytes would seem to challenge the view that they are obligate to dung. However, endophyte status is controversial because surface-sterilization protocols could fail to kill dung fungus ascospores stuck to the plant surface. Thus, we first...

A mature shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata) stand on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee at the Catoosa Wildlife Management Area was harvested in 2001 in response to a regional southern pine beetle outbreak and converted into a savannah through periodic prescribed burns in 2005, 2010, and 2013. Following the harvest and series of burns, the stand was occupied by shortleaf pine seedlings and saplings of different sizes (<5 feet, 6 to 10 feet, and >10 feet) at a rate of approximately 400 stems per acre. Given the re-sprouting capability of shortleaf pine, the objective of this study was to...