Treesearch

With an increased interest in reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, tree planting and maintenance in urban areas has become a viable option for increasing carbon sequestration. Methods for assessing the potential for planting trees within an urban area should allow for quick, inexpensive, and accurate estimations of available land using current remote sensing sources. Here we use Landsat 8, launched in February 2013, and the USDA’s NAIP program to perform supervised classification of land cover classes in six southern cities. These supervised classifications were used to determine the...

This research quantifies changes in consumer welfare due to changes in visitor satisfaction with the availability of information about recreational sites. The authors tested the hypothesis that an improvement in visitor satisfaction with recreation information increases the number of visits to national forests, resulting in increased consumer welfare. They tested the hypothesis with a travel cost model for the Allegheny National Forest using data from the National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) programme. An ex ante simulation suggests that annual per capita consumer welfare increased when...

How a species spreads once introduced into a new environment is a major question in landscape genetics. When the species in question is a potential disease vector, the findings are important not only for fundamental science, but can impact applied science and public health as well. In this issue of Molecular Ecology Medley et al. (2014) study, the invasion patterns of the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), which is thought to have been introduced in Houston, Texas in the 1980s and can be a vector for human disease including dengue fever, West Nile virus, yellow fever, encephalomeyliti...

Active management is needed to sustain healthy limber pine (Pinus flexilis E. James) forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains (henceforth, Southern Rockies), as they are threatened by the interaction of the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) epidemic, climate change, and the spread of the non-native pathogen that causes white pine blister rust disease (Cronartium ribicola A. Dietr.). Appropriate source material for restoration and proactive introduction needs to be selected, taking into account potential genetic differentiation that would hamper management success. We...

Bagasse flour (BF) was liquefied using bi-component polyhydric alcohol (PA) as a solventand phosphoric acid as a catalyst in a microwave reactor. The effect of BF to solvent ratio andreaction temperatures on the liquefaction extent and characteristics of liquefied products wereevaluated. The results revealed that almost 75% of the raw bagasse was converted into liquidproducts within 9 min at 150 C with a BF to solvent ratio of 1/4. The hydroxyl and acid values of theliquefied bagasse (LB) varied with the liquefied conditions. High reaction temperature combiningwith low BF to solvent ratio...

Big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.) is the most widespread and common shrub in the sagebrush biome of western North America. Of the three most common subspecies of big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), mountain big sagebrush (ssp. vaseyana; MBS) is the most resilient to disturbance, but still requires favorable climactic conditions and a viable post-fire seedbank for successful unassisted recovery. This study was designed to assess MBS seed production throughout post-fire recovery. We performed 2 pilot studies to develop methods for estimating seed production and plant age. The...

Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) are rare winter residents in eastern North America, with most found along the Appalachian Mountains and few reported on the coastal plain of the Carolinas. We used remote cameras baited with wild pig (Sus scrofa) and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) carcasses to detect, age, and individually identify Golden Eagles on the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River Site on the coastal plain of South Carolina. We identified eight individual Golden Eagles during the winters of 2013–2014 and 2014–2015, with one detected during both winters. We...

We address the question of spatial extent: how model results depend on the amount and type of space represented. For models of how stream habitat affects fish populations, how do the amount and characteristics of habitat represented in the model affect its results and how well do those results represent the whole stream? Our analysis used inSalmo, an individual-based model of anadromous salmonid spawning, incubation, and juvenile rearing. The model was applied to 12 sites, totaling 4.0 km in length, on Clear Creek, California, treating the simulated 4.0 km as a synthetic whole stream....

Agroforestry has large potential for carbon (C) sequestration while providing many economical, social, and ecological benefits via its diversified products. Airborne lidar is considered as the most accurate technology for mapping aboveground biomass (AGB) over landscape levels. However, little research in the past has been done to study AGB of agroforestry systems using airborne lidar data. Focusing on an agroforestry system in the Brazilian Amazon, this study first predicted plot-level AGB using fixed-effects regression models that assumed the regression coefficients to be constants. The...

Fire frequency, extent, and size exhibit a strong linkage with climate conditions and play a vital role in the climate system. Previous studies have shown that the frequency of large fires in the western United States increased significantly since the mid-1980s due to climate warming and frequent droughts. However, less work has been conducted to examine burned area and fire emissions of large fires at a national scale, and the underlying mechanisms accounting for the increases in the frequency of large fires are far fromclear. In this study, we integrated remote-sensed fire perimeter and...