Treesearch

Forest management practices on public forests are controversial with many organizational and individual stakeholders. Forest managers' understanding of the attitudes of stakeholders is necessary to honor statutory requirements and the social contract under which they operate. The human dimension component of the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment (HEE) in Indiana included a study of recreationists' and neighboring landowners' forest management attitudes by examining the acceptability of alternative management practices on Morgan-Monroe State Forest (MMSF) before and after providing brief...

Private forests are a vital component of the natural ecosystem infrastructure of the United States, and provide critical ecosystem services including clean air and water, energy, wildlife habitat, recreational services, and wood fiber. These forests have been subject to conversion to developed uses due to increasing population pressures. This study examines the changing patterns in the private forests across the urban-rural gradient in 36 states in the eastern United States. We combine observed forest management activities, housing pressure, and 50-year projections of development pressures...

The Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment (HEE) is a long-term, landscape-level field experiment initiated in 2006 by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources-Division of Forestry. The HEE is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative research project involving researchers from Purdue University, Indiana State University, Ball State University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Drake University. It is designed to study the ecological and social impacts of forest management through a replicated series of study areas established across 730 hectares in two Indiana State Forests. Each of the nine...

The cerulean warbler (Setophaga cerulea) is a small Neotropical migrant songbird that is currently experiencing population declines. We monitored the number of cerulean warblers, as well as size and spatial attributes of territories, before two methods of silvicultural treatments took place in six of nine study units involved in the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment within the Morgan-Monroe and Yellowwood State Forests in southern Indiana. Data were collected during the 2007 and 2008 breeding seasons. Relative abundance was apparently greater in 2008, but this increase was not consistent at...

To understand better how eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina carolina) are affected by forest management practices, we monitored movements of box turtles prior to silvicultural treatments within the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment (HEE) in Indiana. During 2007 and 2008, we tracked 23-28 turtles on six units of the HEE. Estimated minimum convex polygon home-range sizes (range 0.8-187.7 ha) varied among units and across years but were similar among slated treatment types (control, even-aged, and uneven-aged). These data will allow us to test for short-term responses of box turtles to...

The timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) is a species of conservation concern throughout much of its geographic range and may serve as a sentinel species in investigations of the effects of timber harvesting on forest reptiles. Our objective was to determine the effect of even-aged timber management regimes on timber rattlesnake home range and movements. During pre-treatment data collection in 2007 and 2008, we tracked 23 rattlesnakes on 4 units of the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment in Indiana. Home-range sizes of male rattlesnakes (65.7 ha) were greater than non-gravid (20.6 ha) and...

In long-term, large-scale forest management studies, documentation of pre-treatment differences among and variability within experimental units is critical for drawing the proper inferences from imposed treatments. We compared pre-treatment overstory and large shrub communities (diameters at breast height >1.5 cm) for the 9 research cores with the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment (HEE) in south-central Indiana with a total of 683 0.1-ha sampling plots. There were many significant differences (p < 0.05) in stand structure among the cores for many attributes, but intra-core variability was not...

Declining population trends of breeding birds associated with mature forests of the eastern and central United States have been a major concern for conservationists and land managers. As a landscape-scale, long-term, manipulative experiment, the Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment (HEE) in Indiana may provide important insights into factors associated with these declines. Accordingly, we quantified the characteristics of the breeding bird community at the HEE sites using 3 years of pre-treatment data. We also compared the HEE breeding bird community to similar data collected for the long-term...

Bark beetles cause significant tree mortality in coniferous forests across North America. Mapping beetle-caused tree mortality is therefore important for gauging impacts to forest ecosystems and assessing trends. Remote sensing offers the potential for accurate, repeatable estimates of tree mortality in outbreak areas. With the advancement of multi-temporal disturbance detection methods using Landsat data, the capability exists for improvement inmapping methods, yetmore information is needed to determine the accuracy of thesemethods for mapping forest disturbances and to quantify difference...

Enhanced Heat Release Rate (HRR) methodology has been extended to the Mass Loss Calorimeter (MLC) and the Modified Schlyter flame spread test to evaluate fire retardant effectiveness used on wood based materials. Modifications to MLC include installation of thermopile on the chimney walls to correct systematic errors to the sensible HRR calculations to account for radiant energy losses to the chimney walls. Additionally, pure ethylene glycol for low flame radiant losses and the PMMA for high flame radiant losses supplanted the use of methane for calibrating the sensible HRR. The FPL 3 MW...