Treesearch

There is a general assumption that intraspecific populations originating from relatively arid climates will be better adapted to cope with the expected increase in drought from climate change. For ecologically and economically important species, more comprehensive, genecological studies that utilize large distributions of populations and direct measures of traits associated with drought-resistance are needed to empirically support this assumption because of the implications for the natural or assisted regeneration of species. We conducted a space-for-time substitution, common garden...

The volume of publically available geospatial data on the web is rapidly increasing due to advances in server-based technologies and the ease at which data can now be created. However, challenges remain with connecting individuals searching for geospatial data with servers and websites where such data exist. The objective of this paper is to present a publically available Geospatial Search Engine (GSE) that utilizes a web crawler built on top of the Google search engine in order to search the web for geospatial data. The crawler seeding mechanism combines search terms entered by users with...

Multiple levels of simulation are used to test the robustness of estimators of the components of change. I first created a variety of spatial-temporal populations based on, but more variable than, an actual forest monitoring data set and then sampled those populations under a variety of sampling error structures. The performance of each of four estimation approaches is evaluated when the temporal scale of the estimand of interest is 1 year while the temporal scale of observation is t years. Three approaches for estimating the individual components of forest change are compared over five...

Ecosystem services, fundamental to livelihoods and well-being, are reshaping environmental management and policy. However, the behavioral dimensions of ecosystem services and the responses of ordinary people to the management of those services, is less well understood. The ecosystem services framework lends itself to understanding the relationship between ecosystems and human behavior. Ecosystem services, according to the psychological theory of motivational functionalism, are motivations—the personal and social processes that initiate, direct and sustain human action. Thus, how people...

Hurricanes are major disturbances in many forests, but studies showing effects of natural hurricanes on herbivory rates have yielded mixed results. Forest managers could benefit from a better understanding of the effects of disturbances on herbivory to manage for particular recovery or restoration goals after anthropogenic or natural disturbances, such as logging and windstorms. I measured herbivory on eight understory plant species that are common pioneer and non-pioneer species in a rainforest in Puerto Rico, following experimental manipulation of forest plots to simulate the two major...

Animals respond to a variety of environmental cues, including weather conditions, when migrating. Understanding the relationship between weather and migration behaviour is vital to assessing time- and energy limitations of soaring birds. Different soaring modes have different efficiencies, are dependent upon different types of subsidized lift and are weather dependent. We collected GPS locations from 47 known-age golden eagles that moved along 83 migration tracks. We paired each location with weather to determine meteorological correlates of migration during spring and fall as birds...

Federal agencies have led the development of adaptation principles and tools in forest ecosystems over the past decade. Successful adaptation efforts generally require organizations to: (1) develop science-management partnerships, (2) provide education on climate change science, (3) provide a toolkit of methods and processes for vulnerability assessment and adaptation, (4) use multiple models to generate projections of climate change effects, (5) incorporate risk and uncertainty, (6) integrate with multiple management objectives, (7) prioritize no-regrets decision making, (8) support...

De los organismos de suelo, las lombrices de tierra son las mas conocidas y a menudo son consideradas las mas importantes por su influencia en el funcionamiento de ecosistemas de suelo (Hendriz y Bohlen, 2002). Tienen un efecto significativo en la estructura del suelo, el ciclo de nutrimentos y ls productividad de las cosechas. En terminos de biomasa, generalmente dominan la cadena alimentaria del suelo (Lavelle et al., 1999; Gonzalez y Seastedt, 2001; Gonzalez, 2002; Liu y Zou, 2002).

This resource update provides an overview of forest resources in Alabama based on an inventory conducted by the U.S. Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program at the Southern Research Station in cooperation with the Alabama Forestry Commission.

Quantifying carbon in agroforestry trees requires biomass equations that capture the growth differences (e.g., tree specific gravity and architecture) created in the more open canopies of agroforestry plantings compared with those generally encountered in forests. Whereas forest-derived equations are available, equations for open-grown trees are not. Data from destructively sampled open-grown trees in the Northern Great Plains were used to examine the uncertainties in the use of forest-derived equations for open-grown trees. Three species, representative of major morphological types of...