Treesearch

Front matter pages for Future Forests of the Northern United States.

A major challenge associated with forest land parcelization, defined as the subdivision of forest land holdings into smaller ownership parcels, is that little information exists on how to measure its severity and judge its impacts across forest landscapes. To address this information gap, an on-line survey presented field-based public natural resource managers in the Lake States of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan with four private forest ownership patterns, each containing the same total forest area, number of parcels, and average parcel size. Survey respondents ranked each landscape...

Dams convert riverine habitat to a series of reaches or zones where differences in flow, habitat, and biota, both downstream and in reservoirs, are obvious and well described. At the upstream extent of a reservoir, however, is a transitional reach or zone that contains characteristics of riverine habitat both in the upper reservoir and in tributaries connected to the reservoir.

Evapotranspiration (ET) is one of the most important hydrologic parameters for vegetation growth, carbon sequestration, and other associated biodiversity study and analysis. Plant stomatal conductance, leaf area index, canopy temperature, soil moisture, and wind speed values generally correlate well with ET. It is difficult to estimate these hydrologic parameters of vast forest cover through in-situ measurements.

The southern United States is a potential leader in producing biofuels from intensively managed, short rotation (8–12 years) woody crops such as southern pines, and native and non-native hardwoods. However, their accelerated development under intensive management has raised concerns that fast-growing bioenergy crops could reduce recharge to stream flows and groundwater, relative to other land cover types or less intensively managed woody crops.

The rapid loss of eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) from riparian zones in the southern Appalachian Mountains due to Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (Adelgis tsugae, HWA) infestation has resulted in changes to watershed structure and function. Several restoration strategies have been proposed, including silvicultural treatments that increase incident light in forest understories, and the introduction of predator beetles to control populations of HWA.

Monitoring of stream water chemistry in forested watersheds provides information to environmental scientists that relate management operations to hydrologic and biogeochemical processes. We used data for the first order watershed, WS80, and second order watershed, WS79, at Santee Experimental Forest. We also used data from a third order watershed, WS78, to identify the differences in temporal changes of stream water chemistry from 2006 to 2012. Phosphate concentrations for WS80 and WS79 decreased from 2006 to 2012. Most of the nitrogen (N) component was dominated by organic N and the...

Wildland fires contribute to the natural succession in forested watersheds by stimulating growth and biodiversity. Notwithstanding, these fires present an increasing hazard at the wildland-urban interface, and cover large areas as a result of the high fire severity associated with forest densification.

Mangroves are transitional environments, where fresh water from the terrestrial environments mix with seawater from the marine environment. The relative contributions of these sources vary and play a role in controlling the physical and chemical hydrological characteristics of mangroves and facilitate the exchange of mass, energy, and organisms between mangroves and the surrounding hydrological landscape.

Despite the growing body of literature on science and management of mangroves, there is a considerable knowledge gap and uncertainty at local levels regarding the carbon pool size, variability of carbon sequestration and carbon stocks within mangrove forests, mechanisms that control carbon emissions from degradation of mangrove forests, impacts of conversion to other land uses, challenges and opportunities associated with restoration practices and sustainability of ecosystem services. These concerns are valid globally, but they are particularly important in Africa due to limited research...