Treesearch

Determining targets in forest restoration is a complicated task that can be facilitated by cooperative partnerships. Too often restoration plans are implemented after adverse events that cause widespread tree mortality, such as drought or insect outbreaks, have occurred. Reactive management precludes the use of preemptive management techniques that can result in more effective restoration. The potential recognition and risks associated with a large-scale mortality event cultivated a proactive partnership among managers, stakeholders, and researchers on the Daniel Boone National Forest in...

Large wildfires in the United States pose significant challenges to fire management agencies charged with protecting lives, property, and natural resources. A vigorous initial response to a wildfire, a process referred to as "initial attack," can greatly reduce the likelihood of the fire becoming larger and causing substantial damage. Successful initial attack depends on deploying the right number and kind of firefighting resources in a timely way. As people build homes where high intensity wildfire is likely, they place greater strain on finite staffing and budgets. Fire planners have...

Photographic guidance is presented to assist with the estimation of Manning’s n and Darcy-Weisbach f in high-gradient plane-bed, step-pool, and cascade channels. Reaches both with and without instream wood are included. These coefficients are necessary for the estimation of reachaverage velocity, energy loss, and discharge. Using data collected in 19 stream channels located in the State of Colorado and the Eastern Italian Alps, on slopes ranging from 2.4 to 21 percent, guidance is provided for low through bankfull flows. Guidance for low flow resistance estimation is additionally provided...

Grassland ecosystems support large communities of aboveground herbivores that can alter ecosystem processes. Thus, grazing by herbivores can directly and indirectly affect belowground properties such as the microbial community structure and diversity. Even though multiple species of functionally different herbivores coexist in grassland ecosystems, most studies have only considered the impact of a single group, i.e. large ungulates (mostly domestic livestock) on microbial communities. Thus, we investigated how the exclusion of four groups of functionally different herbivores affects...

The universally observed exponential increase in soil-surface CO2 effux (‘soil respiration’; FS) with increasing temperature has led to speculation that global warming will accelerate soil organic carbon (SOC) decomposition, reduce SOC storage, and drive a positive feedback to future warming. However, interpreting temperature–FS relationships, and so modelling terrestrial carbon balance in a warmer world, is complicated by the many sources of respired carbon that contribute to FS and a poor understanding of how temperature influences SOC decomposition rates. Here we quantified FS, litterfal...

The RESTORE (Rethinking Ecological and Social Theories of Restoration Ecology) project is an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research endeavor funded by the National Science Foundation's Dynamics of Coupled Natural Human Systems program. The goal of the project is to understand the links between organizational type, decision making processes, and biodiversity outcomes in the context of ecological restoration of oak woodlands in the Chicago metropolitan area. This paper describes the procedures used to design, implement, and analyze the social data gathered for the project. Here we...

The movement of firewood within emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire) (EAB)-infested states and into adjoining areas has been a contributor to its spread throughout the United States and Canada. In an effort to prevent further human-aided spread of EAB and to facilitate interstate commerce, the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and cooperating states in the EAB quarantine have established a heat treatment process to be used as a mitigating treatment to allow movement of firewood from EAB quarantine areas. Firewood producers have since been faced with challenges...

This article reviews five prior commercial wood preservatives that had efficacy concerns. A common factor among all five systems was minimal or no field testing of the proposed system prior to commercialization. Also, the formulation of a successful preservative was twice changed, and one successful system was employed with a new wood species. There is no intent to hold responsible any individual(s), company(ies), or organization(s) for these failures; the purpose is to simply discuss systems which performed less well than expected and report on failure factors. Because it appears that...

Low-rise nonresidential building construction is an important market in Canada for lumber, engineered wood products, structural wood panels, and nonstructural wood panels. This report examines wood products consumption in 2012 for construction of selected low-rise nonresidential buildings types that have six or fewer stories. Buildings with more than six stories are typically severely restricted by building code from being wood framed.

Mountain pine beetle killed lodgepole pine wood chips were pretreated by SPORL (Sulfite Pretreatment to Overcome the Recalcitrance of Lignocelluloses) at 180
C for 25 min and 165
C for 75 min using the same chemical loadings, which represent the same pretreatment severity. The pretreated whole slurries were used to produce lignosulfonate and ethanol through simultaneous enzymatic saccharification and combined fermentation (SSCombF) up to solid loadings of 18% without detoxification. Low temperature pretreatment reduced furan formation, which facilitated ethanol production as measured by...