Treesearch

We examined the relation of an Olympic Mountain (Washington, U.S.A.) whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) population to its physical and biological environments. We analyzed temperature, light, soil moisture, foliar nutrients, tree size and age, white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola), plant species canopy cover, slope stability, and snow cover data to assess the dynamic nature of the whitebark pine population and plant communities since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850 Common Era. We found that high summer temperatures, drought, and slope stability were important in controlling...

This document provides descriptions and definitions to help users interpret and understand key concepts presented on the Climate Change Atlas website. Information is intended to support users in exploring and using the data and model outputs in the Climate Change Atlas. As users progress through this document, information builds upon previous concepts with exercises and examples. The guide concludes with a more in-depth description of the scientific methods used to model species habitat suitability, migration potential, and adaptability scores. This document will serve as an archive of...

Laurel wilt is a disease of woody plants in the laurel family (Lauraceae). Hundreds of millions of redbay (Persea borbonia) trees have been killed by laurel wilt in the southeastern Atlantic Coastal Plain region of the United States (US). The disease has also killed large numbers of sassafras (Sassafras albidum) trees in forests and landscapes, and avocado (Persea americana) trees in commercial production. As of October 2019, laurel wilt was known to occur from Texas to North Carolina, south through Florida and north to Kentucky. Laurel wilt is expected to continue spreading through...

Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument was designated by the U.S. Congress in 1982 to conserve the landscape for natural regeneration, scientific research, education, and cultural resource preservation. However, this designation has not eliminated threats from the introduction of non-native species. The non-native New Zealand mud snail (NZMS), Potamopyrgus antipodarum, was first observed in 2016 along the SW shore of Spirit Lake at the foot of Mount St. Helens, despite the lake’s closure to public recreation and isolation from other known sites harboring NZMS. Our study mapped native...

Introduced species may exhibit variations in their preferred climatic niches between their native and introduced ranges, which can have important implications for the transferability of distribution models. In the Himalayan ecoregion, little is known about the geographic distribution and climatic niche overlap between native and introduced cold-water species. Here, we used the COUE (centroid shift, overlap, unfilling, and expansion) framework to explore the invasive potential of rainbow (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and brown (Salmo trutta fario) trout and corresponding climatic niche overlap with...

Herpetofaunal diseases were a dominant theme in meeting rooms at the Borneo Convention Center in Kuching, Malaysia, where the 2024 Global Amphibian and Reptile Disease Conference (GARD24: Fig. 1) convened with the 10th World Congress of Herpetology (WCH10), 5–9 August 2024. Disease topics were addressed in 133 abstracts, representing 9% of all joint-meeting submissions (available online; Das 2024), covering work on 15 categories of disease agents across 34 nations. Although diseases are natural components of ecosystems, this relatively large proportion of amphibian and reptile disease...

The subject of our proposed book is broadly ecological silviculture, which is a transformative approach for managing forests ecosystems based on emulation of natural models of development and that explicitly incorporates ecological objectives into prescriptions for on-the-ground activities. Specifically, our proposal is for a book that presents examples of comprehensive forest developmental models and corresponding ecological silvicultural systems for major temperate and boreal forests in North America, as well as select forest ecosystems in Europe, South American, and Australasia. These...

The North American boreal forest spans over 600 million hectares and includes a diversity of ecosystems and forest communities [1]. The boreal forest reaches its southwestern range limit within the Great Lakes Region (GLR) in the United States (Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, USA) and Canada (Ontario). Within the GLR, one of the dominant southern boreal forest communities is the lowland conifer ecosystem, which has been variously referred to as lowland conifer ecosystem, swamp, bog, peatland, marsh, waabashkiki (Ojibwe), and mashkiig (Ojibwe) [2, 3]. From a European- American perspectiv...

The Pacific coastal temperate rainforest of North America (“temperate rainforest”) includes the region adjacent to the Pacific Ocean along the west coast of the United States and Canada, including a narrow fog belt that stretches from northern California through Oregon and Washington, after which it widens to include most of coastal British Columbia (BC) and southeast Alaska, and tapers off in southcentral Alaska (Figure 15.1). The region is characterized by moderate temperatures and abundant precipitation throughout much of the year. In the north, a perhumid climate dominates where...

The forests of the southern Appalachians, defined here as the Central Blue Ridge Mountains, Southern Blue Ridge Mountains, and the Metasedimentary Mountains, stretch from northeast Georgia to southwestern Virginia, USA (Figure 8.1). The complex topography and humid temperate climate create growing conditions for a rich variety of forested plant communities. Forest types occur in ecological zones classified by elevation, aspect, and geology that create patterns of temperature, moisture, and productivity.