Treesearch

Forests cover 42 percent of the Northern United States, and collectively they store 13 billion tons of carbon in live trees (29 percent), roots (6 percent), forest floor (9 percent), dead trees (6 percent), and soils (50 percent). About half the biomass of a live tree (dry weight basis) is sequestered carbon (Woodall et al. 2011) - not the largest but the most dynamic source of sequestered forest carbon over time. Through photosynthesis, live trees emit oxygen in exchange for the carbon dioxide that they pull from the atmosphere, storing the carbon in wood above ground and roots below...

Forests are an important source of timber and nontimber products, recreation, ecological services, and employment in the Northern United States. Timber products are primarily used for building homes; manufacturing flooring, furniture, and cabinets; and making paper and paperboard. Residues from forest harvesting operations and wood processing are used for bioenergy, charcoal, and landscaping mulch. The employment opportunities in forestry range from research and development to logging and manufacturing. Maple syrup is the most prominent nontimber forest product in the North in terms of...

The Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) is designed to answer who, where, why and how environmental stewardship groups are caring for our urbanized landscapes. This report is intended to be a guide for those who wish to start STEW-MAP in their own city. It contains step-by-step directions for how to plan and implement a STEW-MAP project. STEW-MAP is both an empirical study of a city's or region's civic environmental stewardship resources and a publicly available online database to help support environmental stewardship broadly in these cities. The project adds a social...

The U.S. North - the 20 states bounded by Maine, Maryland, Missouri, and Minnesota - have a greater forest cover (42 percent of land area) and population density (194 people per square mile) than other large regions of the nation. Ecological, social, and economic changes anticipated over the next 50 years will profoundly affect future forest management needs and opportunities in the North. This report draws on data from numerous sources to analyze 13 scenarios that consider future forest change in response to assumptions about land-use change, economic change, greenhouse gas emissions,...

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.