Treesearch

Prescribed burning is used to reduce fuel loads and to return fire to its historic disturbance role in western forests. Managers need to know the effects of prescribed fire on tree growth. Growth of residual ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex Laws.) was measured in an existing long-term study of the effects of season-of-prescribed burn in combination with a single or a repeated burn. Each of six previously thinned mixed-age stands in the Blue Mountains near Burns, Oregon, was subdivided into three experimental units, and one of three treatments was randomly assigned to each: fall...

Smart growth strategies of infill and compact growth in existing suburban cities will most likely not be sufficient to absorb a new US household growth in the future. To meet housing demands and preferences, master-planned communities will continue to be built in outlying exurban areas. However, little is known about the impacts these communities may have on the surrounding physical, built and social environment in the exurban landscape. In this paper, we provide a review of the literature of what is known about the drivers behind the development of master-planned communities and the...

A 1.21-ha plot was established in a mature pine–hardwood forest (Hyatt’s Woods) along a low stream terrace in southeastern Arkansas. Compositionally, this stand had considerable arboreal richness, with 26 different tree species ≥9 cm in diameter. Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) contributed 42% of the stand’s 37.1 m²/ha of basal area; the remaining fraction included baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) and 24 hardwood species (no other single taxon exceeded 12%). Only a limited volume (15.2 m³/ha) of dead wood was encountered. The large size of the dominant conifers and abundance of high wood...

Data from large-scale biological inventories are essential for understanding and managing Earth's ecosystems. The Forest Inventory and Analysis Program (FIA) of the U.S. Forest Service is the largest biological inventory in North America; however, the FIA inventory recently changed from an amalgam of different approaches to a nationally-standardized approach in 2000. Full use of both data sets is clearly warranted to target many pressing research questions including those related to climate change and forest resources. However, full use requires lumping FIA data from different regionally-ba...

Stomata control tree transpiration by sensing and integrating environmental signals originating in the atmosphere and soil, and co-occurring species may differ in inherent stomatal sensitivity to these above- and belowground signals and in the types of signals to which they respond. Stomatal responsiveness to environmental signals is likely to differ across species having different types of wood (e.g., ring-porous, diffuse-porous and coniferous) because each wood type differs in the structure, size and spatial distribution of its xylem conduits as well as in the scaling of hydraulic...

Forest systems are increasingly threatened by emergent, exotic diseases, yet management strategies for forest trees may be hindered by long generation times and scant background knowledge. We tested whether nursery disease resistance and growth traits have predictive value for the conservation of Notholithocarpus densiflorus, the host most susceptible to sudden oak death. We established three experimental populations to assess nursery growth and resistance to Phytophthora ramorum, and correlations between nursery-derived breeding values with seedling survival in a field disease trial....

As the climate changes, human land use may impede species from tracking areas with suitable climates. Maintaining connectivity between areas of different temperatures could allow organisms to move along temperature gradients and allow species to continue to occupy the same temperature space as the climate warms. We used a coarse-filter approach to identify broad corridors for movement between areas where human influence is low while simultaneously routing the corridors along present-day spatial gradients of temperature. We modified a cost-distance algorithm to model these corridors and...

Designing policies to harness the potential of heterogeneous target groups such as nonindustrial private forest owners to contribute to public policy goals can be challenging. The behaviors of such groups are shaped by their diverse motivations and circumstances. Segmenting heterogeneous target groups into more homogeneous subgroups may improve the chances of successfully identifying policy strategies to influence their behavior. Findings from a multi method study of nonindustrial private forest owners in eastern Oregon suggest four unique subgroups of owners with different fuel management...

Figure can add value to wood products, but its occurrence is unpredictable. A first step in reliably producing figured wood is determining whether it is faithfully transmitted to progeny via sexual and asexual reproduction. We describe a 26-year-old male aspen genotype, designated ‘Curly Poplar’, which was shown to be a Populus × canescens hybrid using microsatellite markers. All rooted cuttings of this genotype exhibited an undulating pattern on the radial surface that was not seen in the control trees, all of which showed a smooth radial surface and straight grain. We observed spiral...

Diadromous aquatic species that cross a diverse range of habitats (including marine, estuarine, and freshwater) face different effects of climate change in each environment. One such group of species is the anadromous Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.). Studies of the potential effects of climate change on salmonids have focused on both marine and freshwater environments. Access to a variety of estuarine habitat has been shown to enhance juvenile life-history diversity, thereby contributing to the resilience of many salmonid species. Our study is focused on the effect of sea-level rise on...