Treesearch

Quality hardwood species often dominate stands on intermediate to high quality sites before regeneration. However, successfully regenerating these species after the harvest is rarely achieved on these sites. Hardwood species were planted on a high quality site in southern Illinois after clearcutting to study the effect of several cultural practices on the hardwoods' survival and growth. The performance of four hardwoods, black walnut (Juglans nigra L.), northern red oak (Quercus rubra L.), white oak (Q. alba L.), and cherrybark oak (Q. pagoda Raf.), were significantly (α = 0.05) affected...

Hybridization of American chestnut (Castanea dentata) with Chinese chestnut (C. mollissima), followed by backcrossing to American chestnut, is conducted to increase the resistance of resulting stock to chestnut blight, caused by the fungal pathogen Cryphonectria parasitica (Murr.) Barr. Backcross breeding is being used to restore American chestnut throughout its range, including cold high elevation sites in southern and central regions, and along chestnut's northern range limits. Until now, a comparative analysis of the growth and cold hardiness of American chestnut seed sources grown in...

The steeply dissected glaciated landscapes of the Chariton River Hills Ecological Subsection (CRHES) in northern Missouri have extensive, but largely unmanaged, oak forests that are relatively unstudied. There is increasing interest in these forests for oak ecosystem restoration, ecological site description, and production of oak timber for biofuels. Our objectives were to determine how productivity, composition, and structure varied across the CRHES and locally by slope position and aspect. We inventoried vegetation and soils at 48 sites on upper and lower slope positions paired by...

Results for several major stand level variables from a 7-year-old yellow-poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera L.) plantation established in a converted pasture in northern West Virginia were summarized based on initial planting densities of 1,517 trees/ac, 972 trees/ac, 765 trees/ac, and 602 trees/ac. Stand basal area/acre at age 7 was greatest (54.7 ft2/ac) for the 4 ft spacing and least (22.1 ft2/ac) for the 10 ft spacing. Average total height for all trees was similar for all spacing treatments except for the 10 ft spacing which was approximately 6 ft shorter at age 7. Based on locally fit...

Equations were developed to estimate outside-bark, merchantable stem green weight (lb) and inside-bark merchantable stem volume (ft3) for sawtimber-sized Nuttall oak (Quercus texana Buckley), overcup oak (Quercus lyrata Walt.), water oak (Quercus nigra L.), and willow oak (Quercus phellos L.) found at two bottomland hardwood sites in southeast Arkansas. Sixty-one trees were used in this study. Trees ranged from 43 to 90 years in age (average of 62 years), 12 to 34 inches in diameter at breast height (d.b.h.) (averaging 19.5 inches), 60 to 120 feet in total height (averaging 94 feet), 27 to...

Although historic land use is often implicated in non-native plant invasion of forests, little is known about how land-use legacies might actually facilitate invasion. We conducted a 2-year field seeding experiment in western North Carolina, USA, to compare germination and first-year seedling survival of Celastrus orbiculatus Thunb. in stands that had been cultivated and abandoned a century earlier and were dominated by tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera L.), and in paired stands that had never been cultivated and were dominated by oaks (Quercus spp.). Experiments were conducted at five...

Hydrological effects of land-use change are of great concern to ecohydrologists and watershed managers, especially in the Atlantic coastal plain of the southeastern United States. The concern is attributable to rapid population growth and the resulting pressure to develop forested lands. Many researchers have studied these effects in various scales, with varying results. An extended watershed-scale forest hydrologic model, calibrated with 1996–2000 data, was used to evaluate long-term hydrologic effects of conversion to agriculture (corn–wheat–soybean cropland) of a 29.5-km2 intensively...

Canopy coverage is a key variable used to characterize forest structure. In addition, the light transmitted through the canopy is an important ecological indicator of plant and animal habitat and understory climate conditions. A common ground-based method used to document canopy coverage is to take digital photographs from below the canopy. To assist with analyzing below-canopy photographs, the U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station has developed a computer software tool called ForestCrowns. ForestCrowns calculates canopy transparency (or light transmittance) for digital images...

Background and aims Climate change alters regional plant species distributions, creating new combinations of litter species and soil communities. Biogeographic patterns in microbial communities relate to dissimilarity in microbial community function, meaning novel litters to communities may decompose differently than predicted from their chemical composition. Therefore, the effect of a litter species in the biogeochemical cycle of its current environment may not predict patterns after migration. Under a tree migration sequence we test whether litter quality alone drives litter decomposition...

Determining total tree leaf area is necessary for describing tree carbon balance, growth efficiency, and other measures used in tree-level and stand-level physiological growth models. We examined the effects of vegetation control methods on the total leaf area of sapling-size plantation black walnut trees using allometric approaches. We found significant differences in total tree leaf area and cross-sectional stem area at breast height between trees receiving 100 percent (pre-emergent and post-emergent) weed control treatment and those receiving pre-emergent control or no control. Additiona...