Treesearch

There is a long history of humans either intentionally or accidentally moving plant species to areas outside of their native ranges. In novel environments, populations of many of these plant species exhibit explosive population growth and spread, in part due to the absence of coevolved enemies such as herbivorous insects. However, over time such enemies can ‘catch up’ with their host and re-establish host–herbivore relationships. Though this phenomenon has been documented in several systems, little evidence exists on how this re-assembly of enemies results in increased levels of herbivory....

The detrimental issues surrounding the accumulation of traditional plastic waste are well known. A myriad of research has been conducted in the past few decades related to the synthesis of polymers using plant oils as starting monomers to obtain polymers from renewable sources. These polymers can be biodegradable and, therefore, can decrease further plastic waste accumulation. Although many studies have been conducted on the polymerization of soybean oil (SBO), comparatively few studies have been conducted on the polymerization of cottonseed oil (CSO). CSO is an excellent candidate for a...

Exploring food packaging films from environmentally friendly materials and their practical manufacturing routes are important research topics for academia and industry. Poly (lactic acid) (PLA) is a bio-based plastic being used commercially but with low barrier performance for food packaging applications. Cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs), as renewable materials, show potential use in packaging applications, attributed to their excellent oxygen barrier performance. However, pure CNC films cannot be readily produced and used because of their brittleness and water sensitivity. Creating a...

Standalone cellulose nanofibril (CNF) films have a natural tendency to shrink upon drying from wet conditions due to capillary drying stresses. This shrinkage happens in both the radial direction, and the vertical direction. In this study, we prepared two types of CNF films- one in a restrained condition that did not allow shrinkage in the radial direction but enabled it in the vertical direction and another with 11 % radial shrinkage but limited vertical shrinkage. The radial shrinkage led to a more porous structure than the vertical shrinkage, which brought about poorer oxygen/moisture...

Wild (or lowbush) blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium Ait.) undergo severe drought impacts due to climate warming because they grow in sandy soils with poor water retention. The feasibility was studied for using biochar in a forest biomass-fueled combined heat and power (CHP) plant to amend the sandy soils. The chemico-physical properties (e.g., bulk density, moisture content, porosity, pH) of the biochar were measured. An acid treatment method (1% to 3% acidic or citric acid solution) was developed to decrease the biochar pH from 11.4 to neutral or lower, aiming to aid in weed control in...

Microfibrillated, nanofibrillated, and nanocrystalline cellulose materials are next-generation biobased cellulose materials with applications in the food industry as food contact materials and functional ingredients. Manufacturers have adopted a proactive approach to demonstrate the safety of these cellulose materials as they contribute toward a more sustainable economy. Animal studies and alternative testing approaches are needed to fill data gaps in the literature for the physicochemical and toxicological characterization of cellulose materials. Recently, the European Food Safety...

In 2019, Maine’s forest products industry had a total economic impact of $8.1 billion. The industry employed over 31,000 people, with $1.7 billion in labor income. Ensuring a sustained inventory is the first link in the supply chain that helps the forest sector thrive—namely, that mills stay open, and jobs remain intact. Recognizing that the forest has potential to produce more timber sustainably may allow the industry to grow. On the other hand, acknowledging the limitations of Maine’s forests will hopefully reduce the risk of creating overcapacity in Maine’s forest products sector....

The structure of forest canopies from the individual tree crown to the stand canopy level informs a range of ecologically significant factors from photosynthetic capacity and tree vigor to wildlife habitat quality and crown fire potential. However, the data needed for characterizing the crown length/crown ratio is often, at best, subsampled during forest inventories. Therefore, it is important for forest growth and yield models to estimate these missing forest inventory values and to project future changes in crown structure. However, the wide range of tree and stand attributes impacting...

Forest conservation and management plans, decisions, and policy analyses are commonly developed and reported using the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) software without substantial investment or attention to ensuring FVS is well-calibrated or unbiased for the decision(s) at hand. The emergence of repeated measurements from plots across the Forest Inventory & Analysis (FIA) network of the United States provides a unique opportunity for ensuring predictions of forest conditions and dynamics are grounded in software that is calibrated frequently against the best available contemporary data,...

FVSOnline is an R-shiny (Rstudio 2023) application that can be used to build FVS (USDA Forest Service 2023) simulations, run, and display results. The system has a client-server architecture where the server is a specialized R package that is running in an R session and the client is a graphical user interface running in a web browser. In addition to the components that are accessed via the web browser, there are R functions contained in the FVSOnline package that support manipulation of FVSOnline projects. Projects can contain several FVS runs and each run can contain several simulation...