Treesearch

Trees bursting forth with new leaves signal the arrival of spring. Budburst for most temperate tree species occurs after a tree has been exposed to a sufficient number of chilling and forcing hours over the winter. Waiting until these chilling and forcing hours have accumulated is a survival mechanism. If a tree bursts bud prematurely, delicate tissue may be damaged by a late frost. Conversely, if a tree bursts bud too late in the spring, it will be unable to achieve substantial height growth before summer drought sets in. Although most Northwest tree species require a combination of...

One conclusion from the 50-year forest projections described in Chapters 2 through 8 is that some of the most dramatic changes to the forests of the North will be the direct result of human activities, including land-use change, forest management, greenhouse gas emissions, and invasive species introductions. The tools that society will have available to influence the type and intensity of these and related human activities will draw from a complex mix of legal, institutional, and policy frameworks. The concepts in this chapter provide a context for the prior chapters of this report and for...

Trees and forests are resources that significantly affect the health and well-being of people who live in urban areas where more than 80 percent of the U.S. population resides. These trees within our cities and communities provide many ecosystem services and values to both urban and rural populations. Healthy urban and rural forests are critical for sustaining quality of life for people in urban areas, but many forces could change the quantity and quality of urban trees and forests in the coming decades.

The forests of the Northern United States have been remarkably resilient to nearly four centuries of immigration and settlement with associated anthropogenic disturbances caused by farming, logging, burning, urbanization, trade, and many other factors. Although resilient, forests conditions have been significantly impacted by humans as is illustrated by the extent of forest land use changes or the introduction of exotic, invasive species. Unquestionably, society has shaped the composition and structure of Northern Forests and will continue to do so in the future. The future holds many...

The purpose of this report is to describe how yesterday's trends and today's choices might change the future forest landscape of the Northern United States from 2010 (the baseline year) to 2060. Its results are intended to help resource managers and policy makers identify actions that will sustain the health, productivity, diversity, and resilience of these forests, which provide for the well-being of the 125 million people who currently live in the 20 Northern States and for 32 million additional people expected by 2060.

One purpose of the Northern Forest Futures Project is to predict change in future forest attributes across the 20 States in the U.S. North for the period that extends from 2010 to 2060. The forest attributes of primary interest are the 54 indicators of forest sustainability identified in the Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators (Montreal Process Working Group, n.d.; USDA FS 2011). However, some indictors are virtually impossible to forecast for future decades, so we concentrated on the forest characteristics that have quantitative or experiential bases for forecasting future change....

People enjoy a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits, from forests, including water purification, recreation, income from tourism, timber products, and the cultural and economic benefits from hunting, fishing, and gathering (Shvidenko et al. 2005). Across the Northern United States, growing human populations will place increased service demands on forests for the foreseeable future. The type, magnitude, and stability of future services from northern forests will depend in part on the level of biological diversity in those forests.

This chapter reports projected changes in forest area, age, volume, biomass, number of trees, and removals from 2010 to 2060 for alternative scenarios that bracket a range of possible future socioeconomic and climate conditions in the Northern United States, which consists of 20 central and northeastern States. As described in Chapter 2, the scenarios incorporate different assumptions about population growth, economic development, land-use change, carbon emissions, and climate change. Changes in forest attributes over time for each scenario were estimated using the Forest Dynamics Model...

Forest health will likely be threatened by a number of factors - including fragmentation, fire regime alteration, and a variety of diseases, insects, and invasive plants - along with global climate change (Krist et al. 2007, Tkacz et al. 2008). By itself, global climate change could dramatically and rapidly alter forest composition and structure (Allen and Breshears 1998, Allen et al. 2010). In conjunction with other threats, global climate change poses unique challenges to forest management by influencing forest dynamics at virtually all levels: disturbance regimes in forest ecosystems;...

Forest ecosystem productivity and functioning depend on soil and water resources. But the reverse is also true—forest and land-use management activities can significantly alter forest soils, water quality, and associated aquatic habitats (Ice and Stednick 2004, Reid 1993, Wigmosta and Burges 2001). Soil and water resources are protected through the allocation of land for that purpose or through appropriate management regimes and best management practices (Blinn and Kilgore 2001, Young 2000). Because the biophysical linkage between soils and hydrological functions is strong, conservation...