Treesearch

What good is a tree or a forest in a city? Or more precisely how much is it worth to the people of the city? In ancient Greece, gods were worshipped in groves of trees and trees were sacred. In Germany the Linden tree was believed to help unearth the truth and judicial meetings were held under a Linden tree. Today, in our industrial forests we value timber based on market prices for cubic meters of lumber, or tons of biomass. In cities, though, we don't grow trees as a marketable product - so how much is a tree worth in a city? Perhaps to someone like Aldo Leopold, we are simply demonstrati...

Understanding a species’ thermal niche is becoming increasingly important for management and conservation within the context of global climate change, yet there have been surprisingly few efforts to compare assessments of a species’ thermal niche across methods. To address this uncertainty, we evaluated the differences in model performance and interpretations of a species’ thermal niche when using different measures of stream temperature and surrogates for stream temperature. Specifically, we used a logistic regression modeling framework with three different indicators of stream thermal...

An EST sequence, designated JnRAP2-like, was isolated from tissue at the heartwood/sapwood transition zone (TZ) in black walnut (Juglans nigra L). The deduced amino acid sequence of JnRAP2-like protein consists of a single AP2- containing domain with significant similarity to conserved AP2/ERF DNA-binding domains in other species. Based on multiple sequence alignment, JnRAP2-like appears to be an ortholog of RAP2.6L (At5g13330), which encodes an ethylene response element binding protein in Arabidopsis thaliana. Real-time PCR revealed that the JnRAP2-like was expressed most abundantly in TZ...

Solioccasus polychromus gen. & sp. nov., the most brightly colored hypogeous fungus known, is described from Papua New Guinea and tropical northern Australia south into subtropical forests along the Queensland coast and coastal mountains to near Brisbane. Phylogenetic analysis of molecular data places it as a sister genus to Bothia in the Boletineae, a clade of predominantly ectomycorrhizal boletes. Ectomycorrhizal trees, such as members of the Myrtaceae (Eucalyptus, Corymbia, Lophostemon, Melaleuca spp.) and Allocasuarina littoralis, were present usually in mixture or in some cases...

Rocky Mountain penstemon, a member of the Figwort family (Schrophulariaceae) is a semi-evergreen, native, perennial forb with fibrous roots and is 35-70 cm tall. Plants are mostly glabrous and the leaves are entire. Basal and lower leaves are 5-15 cm long, 5-16 mm wide, narrowly oblanceolate, rounded at the tip and tapering to the base. The upper leaves are 4-10 cm long, 2-7 mm wide, linear and often folded. The flower stalks have a whorl of 1 or 2 flowers (sometimes 4) at each node. The sepals are 3-5 mm long, glabrous and ovate or rounded to obtuse and are glabrous. The petals are 24-32...

Incorporating vertical vegetation structure into models of animal distributions can improve understanding of the patterns and processes governing habitat selection. LiDAR can provide such structural information, but these data are typically collected via aircraft and thus are limited in spatial extent. Our objective was to explore the utility of satellite-based LiDAR data from the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) relative to airborne-based LiDAR to model the north Idaho breeding distribution of a forest-dependent ecosystem engineer, the Red-naped sapsucker (Sphyrapicus nuchalis)....

This report highlights selected accomplishments by the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station's Wildland Fire and Fuels Research & Development projects in support of the National Fire Plan from 2008 through 2012. These projects are examples of the broad range of knowledge and tools developed by National Fire Plan funding beginning in 2008.

Global interest in bioenergy development has increased dramatically in recent years, due to its promise to reduce dependence on fossil fuel energy supplies, its contribution to global and national energy security, its potential to produce a carbon negative or neutral fuel source and to mitigate climate change, and its potential as a vehicle for rural development. However, a number of societal concerns about bioenergy have been identified, including deforestation and landscape fragmentation, loss of biodiversity, depletion of soil and water resources, introduction of invasive and/or...

Direct Strain Imaging accomplishes full field measurement of the strain tensor on the surface of a deforming body, by utilizing arbitrarily oriented engineering strain measurements originating from digital imaging. In this paper an evaluation of the method’s performance with respect to its operating parameter space is presented along with a preliminary validation based on actual experiments on composite material specimens under tension. It has been shown that the method exhibits excellent accuracy characteristics and outperforms methods based on displacement differentiation.

Public land management agencies have incorporated the concept of vulnerability into protocols for assessing and planning for climate change impacts on public forests and grasslands. However, resource managers and planners have little guidance for how to address the social aspects of vulnerability in these assessments and plans. Failure to assess social vulnerability to climate change during management planning could compromise land management agencies’ adaptation strategies as well as public support for these strategies. We provide a framework for understanding and assessing social...