Treesearch

In 1926, the California Forest Experiment Station, which later became the Pacific Southwest (PSW) Research Station, was established at the University of California, Berkeley. Today, the PSW Research Station represents the research and development branch of the USDA Forest Service in California and Hawaii and the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands. The PSW Research Station develops and delivers science-based information, technologies, and applications to help people make informed decisions about natural resource management, conservation, and environmental protection. This comprensive history...

As many larger secondary woodworking firms have moved production offshore and been adversely impacted by the recent housing downturn, smaller firms have become important to driving U.S. hardwood demand. This study compared and contrasted small and large firms on a number of factors to help determine the unique characteristics of small firms and to provide insights into useful areas for support. Small firms were found to be similar to large firms with respect to the perceived importance attributed to manufacturing capabilities as a business success factor. However, small firms differed...

Wildland fire is an episodic process that greatly influences the composition, structure, and developmental sequence of forests. Most news reports of wildland fire involves blazes fueled by slash, standing dead stems, and snags that reach into tree crowns and burn deeply into the forest floor, causing extensive tree mortality and the eventual replacement of the standing cohort of trees. Fires as part of a silvicultural prescription or that occur at the edges of wildfires are usually less devastating surface fires fueled by surface litter, herbaceous vegetation, and downed woody material....

Aim Because of the low albedo of forests and other biophysical factors, most scenario-based climate modelling studies indicate that removal of temperate forest will promote cooling, indicating that temperate forests are a source of heat relative to other classes of land cover. Our objective was to test the hypothesis that US temperate forests reduce surface temperatures. Location The continental United States. Methods Ordinary least squares regression was used to develop relationships between forest extent and surface temperature. Forest extent was derived from the 900 m² 2001 National...

Acid deposition during the 20th century caused widespread depletion of available soil calcium (Ca) throughout much of the industrialized world. To better understand how forest ecosystems respond to changes in a component of acidification stress, an 11.8-ha watershed was amended with wollastonite, a calcium silicate mineral, to restore available soil Ca to preindustrial levels through natural weathering. An unexpected outcome of the Ca amendment was a change in watershed hydrology; annual evapotranspiration increased by 25%, 18%, and 19%, respectively, for the 3 y following treatment before...

Fuelbeds consist of a number of combustible components that are consumed during a fire, including duff, litter, vegetation (herbs, shrub, foliage, and branches) and down dead woody material (DWM). Combustion of DWM during a fire has a well-documented role in determining fire effects and fire behavior impacts such as emissions (Sandberg and others 2002), vegetative changes (Brown and Smith 2000), soil heating (Neary and others 2005), and fire intensity (Pyne and others 1996). Inventory programs and research studies, such as Brown and See 1981, note that on forested sites in the United...

This publication provides an overview of forest resource attributes for South Dakota based on an annual inventory conducted by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station. These estimates, along with Web-posted core tables, will be updated annually. For more information regarding past inventory reports for South Dakota, inventory program information, and sampling/estimation procedures, please refer to the citations on page 4 of this report. For definitions of terms used in this report, see 'Glossary of Terms' at: https://www.nrs.fs.u...

This publication provides an overview of forest resource attributes for Michigan based on an annual inventory conducted by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the Northern Research Station, U.S. Forest Service. These estimates, along with Web-posted core tables, are updated annually. For more information please refer to page 4 of this report or visit our website: https://www.fia.fs.usda.gov/.

This publication provides an overview of forest resource attributes for Iowa based on an annual inventory (2008-2012) conducted by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station. These estimates, along with Web-posted core tables, are updated annually. For more information please refer to page 4 of this report.

An epidemic of lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) mortality from the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) has swept across the Interior West. Aerial surveys monitor the areal extent of the epidemic, but only Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) field data support a detailed assessment at the tree level. Dynamics of the lodgepole pine population occur at a more rapid rate than the FIA 10-year re-measurement cycle. A model-based approach links population-level estimates from each annual FIA panel estimate. A simple multivariate model predicts the statewide rates of annual change among...