Treesearch

On a summer day in the South, a rubber-tired feller-buncher operator was performing a first thinning in a pine plantation. The feller-buncher was working in a new area of the stand, removing the take-down row and thinning the two rows on either side. The trees were approximately 15 years old, and there was a relatively thick layer of underbrush. The stand of timber surrounded the landowner’s home.

The impacts of escalating wildfire in many regions — the lives and homes lost, the expense of suppression and the damage to ecosystem services — necessitate a more sustainable coexistence with wildfire. Climate change and continued development on fire-prone landscapes will only compound current problems. Emerging strategies for managing ecosystems and mitigating risks to human communities provide some hope, although greater recognition of their inherent variation and links is crucial. Without a more integrated framework, fire will never operate as a natural ecosystem process, and the...

Pervasive forest mortality is expected to increase in future decades as a result of increasing temperatures. Climate-induced forest dieback can have consequences on ecosystem services, potentially mediated by changes in forest structure and understory community composition that emerge in response to tree death. Although many dieback events around the world have been documented in recent years, yellowcedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis) decline provides an opportunity to study vegetation changes occurring over the past century. Current research identifies climate-related reductions in snow...

Paired watershed experiments involving the removal or manipulation of forest cover in one of the watersheds have been conducted for more than a century to quantify the impact of forestry operations on streamflow. Because climate variability is expected to be large, forestry treatment effects would be undetectable without the treatment–control comparison. New understanding of climate variability provides an opportunity to examine whether climate variability interacts with forestry treatments, in a predictable manner. Here, we use data from the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon, USA,...

Many Appalachian streams historically dominated by Brook Trout Salvelinus fontinalis have experienced shifts towards fish communities dominated by Rainbow Trout Onchorhynchus mykiss. We used empirical estimates of biomass and secondary production of trout conspecifics to evaluate species success under varied thermal regimes. Trout populations were sampled in 13 Appalachian streams from Maryland to North Carolina during summer 2012, and biomass and production of trout species were examined in relation to habitat and water temperature data. Rainbow Trout and Brook Trout were found co-occurrin...

As the demand for sustainable materials increases, there are unique challenges and opportunities to develop light-weight green composites materials for a wide range of applications. Thus wood-based composite materials from renewable forests may provide options for some niche applications while helping to protect our environment. In this paper, the wood-based tri-axial sandwich composite materials either made from hardboard or laminated paper are being studied for various applications having different performance requirements. The wood-based tri-axial sandwich composite is composed of a...

Remotely sensed images including LANDSAT, SPOT, NAIP orthoimagery, and LiDAR and relevant processing tools can be used to predict plant stomatal conductance (gs), leaf area index (LAI), and canopy temperature, vegetation density, albedo, and soil moisture using vegetation indices like normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) or soil adjusted vegetation index (SAVI) developed with near infrared (NIR) and red bands. In this study, we present results of those analyses for two study sites with different plant species: 1) a managed loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) forest in coastal North...

Field detection of changes in occurrence, distribution, or abundance of alpine plant species is predicated on knowledge of which species are in specific locations. The alpine zone of the Southern Rocky Mountain Region has been systematically inventoried by the staff and floristics graduate students from the Rocky Mountain Herbarium over the last 27 years. It is centered on the mountain ranges of Colorado and extends north to the Medicine Bow Mountains in southeast Wyoming and south into the Sangre de Cristo Range in north central New Mexico. It also includes the La Sal Mountains of Utah...

An important element of the wise use of water-related ecosystem services provided by El Yunque National Forest, located in the Luquillo Mountains in northeastern Puerto Rico, is the facilitation of a clear understanding about the composition of land cover and its relation to water resources at different scales of analysis, management, and decision making. In this study we present the results of a site-specific analysis that identify and quantify the land cover of the watersheds of the main rivers that have their headwaters in El Yunque National Forest and relate land-cover data to three...

Historical reference conditions provide important context for creating ecological restoration and management plans. The U.S. 19th Century Public Land Survey (PLS) records provide extensive ecological information for constructing such reference conditions. We used PLS records to reconstruct pre-Euro-American tree species cover class and vegetation structure types for the Midwest Driftless Area, a 55,000 km2 region currently experiencing multiple conservation threats. We related cover classes to soil texture, topographic roughness, and distance from waterway. Our analyses revealed that the...