Treesearch

In the past three decades, Puerto Rico (PR) experienced five hurricanes that met or exceeded category three, and they caused severe forest structural damage and elevated tree mortality. To improve our mechanistic understanding of hurricane impacts on tropical forests and assess hurricane‐affected forest dynamics in Earth system models, we use in situ forest measurements at the Bisley Experimental Watersheds in Northeast PR to evaluate the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator coupled with the Energy Exascale Earth System Model Land Model (ELM‐FATES). The observations show...

In many parts of the western United States, wildfires are becoming larger and more severe, threatening the persistence of forest ecosystems. Understanding the ways in which management activities such as prescribed fire and managed wildfire can mitigate fire severity is essential for developing effective forest conservation strategies. We evaluated the effects of previous fuels reduction treatments, including prescribed fire and wildfire managed for resource benefit, and other wildfires on the burn severity of the 2022 Black Fire in southwestern New Mexico, USA. The Black Fire burned over...

This document contains abstracts and papers of the oral and poster presentations offered at the 31st annual U.S. Department of Agriculture interagency research forum on invasives species held in Annapolis, MD, in January 2023. The forum, sponsored by the Forest Service, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and Agricultural Research Service, illustrates the depth and breadth of studies supported by the agencies and their cooperators.

Caribbean islands encompass diverse forest ecosystems which provide valuable ecosystem services to their inhabitants. Currently, researchers rely on global generic or broad regional models or default values to predict tree species growth rates, which, in some cases, have been developed in temperate forests. The ability to understand the factors influencing the growth rates of Caribbean forest ecosystems, including both native and non-native species, has implications for projecting changes in and managing these forests under climate change scenarios. The objective of this study was to...

Rangelands around the globe are experiencing management challenges associated with existing and emerging stressors, including more frequent and severe fires, woody species expansion, annual grass invasion, heavy, repeated growing season grazing, and climate change. Disturbance is an essential part of rangeland systems. Yet climate change is likely to affect rangelands most directly by increasing the likelihood, severity, and extent of long term, negative impacts from disturbance. We conducted a synthesis of key vulnerabilities to climate change for Northwest US rangelands. These rangelands...

Originally, forest sustainability was primarily concerned with continual timber production. Contemporary concepts such as sustainable forest management (SFM) and climate-smart forestry (CSF) emphasize the continual production of multiple forest goods and services, both market and non-market. In addition to the creation of new programs for CSF, recent legislation in the United States (US) has expanded the use of incentive programs traditionally used for subsidizing SFM to also support management activities that aid in climate adaptation and mitigation. Understanding landowner perceptions of...

Windbreaks and hedgerows are two types of conservation buffers that can provide benefits to vineyards and the surrounding landscape. Windbreaks are rows of trees and/or shrubs in linear configurations, often established with the goal of slowing wind. Hedgerows are dense groupings of trees, shrubs, and other plants in a linear design, planted to achieve a natural resource conservation purpose such as providing habitat for wildlife, including pollinators and beneficial natural enemies. Hedgerows and windbreaks are structurally similar and perform many of the same functions. For example, many...

Silvopasture is the practice of managing desired woody perennials, forages, and livestock on the same unit of land. Silvopasture systems can be applied in many settings, including vineyards. In vineyard silvopasture systems, vines are the perennial component and small livestock are grazed in the alleys between vine rows. While grapevines are not trees, they are woody perennials that provide some of the same functions as trees in silvopasture systems. Like trees, grapevines can be intentionally integrated with other components into a single system to generate benefits for both growers and...

Whether specialist pests can cause more damage to their host plants than generalist pests is a critical issue in both basic biology and nonnative species management. To date, there is no consensus on how we define “specialist vs. generalist” pests and how we should assess forest damage or impacts (volume loss vs. mortality). Here, we comparatively investigate whether nonnative generalist pests may cause more damage to US forests than nonnative specialist pests using two frameworks: (1) the “binary or dichotomous approach” through a largely arbitrary classification of specialist and...

Forests contribute to the nutritional and medicinal needs of billions of people worldwide. In the United States, the extent and impacts of provisioning forest foods are not fittingly understood. This study seeks to elucidate the scope and scale of forest food harvest. Using publicly available data, hunting surveys and proprietary data from the Wild Harvest Initiative®, we provide estimates of the amount of foods and medicines from wild-harvested flora and fauna, and meat produced from domesticated livestock grazed on public forest lands. The evidence strongly supports the assertion that...