Treesearch

Taxes are a prominent policy tool and one of a number of factors that have the potential to influence the decisions of the millions of family forest owners across the United States. After a literature review, tax policies most relevant to family forest owners were catalogued, preferential property tax program administrators were surveyed, focus groups with family forest owners and forestry/conservation professionals were held, and results were synthesized with the aid of experts. The results suggest that tax policies, in and of themselves, are not causing forest owners to take unplanned...

An important consideration in forest management to mitigate climate change is the balance between forest carbon (C) storage and ecological sustainability. We explore the effects of management strategies on tradeoffs between forest C stocks and ecological sustainability under five scenarios, three of which included management and two scenarios which provide baselines emulating the natural forest. Managed forest scenarios were: (a) Protection (PROT), i.e., management by suppression of natural disturbance and harvest exclusion; (b) Harvest at a higher rate removing all sustainably available...

If competitive ability depends on body size, then the optimal natal movement from areas of high local population density can also be predicted to be size-dependent. Specifically, small, competitively-inferior individuals would be expected to benefit most from moving to areas of lower local density. Here we evaluate whether individual variation in natal movement following emergence from nests is consistent with such a size-dependent strategy in Atlantic salmon, and whether such a strategy is evident across a range of environmental conditions (principally predator presence and conspecific...

High throughput sequencing has become a powerful tool for fungal ecologists to explore the diversity and composition of fungal communities. However, various biases and errors are associated with the new sequencing techniques that must be handled properly. We here provide evidence for a source of error that has not yet been taken into account.

The performance of a multimodel ensemble over the northeast United States is evaluated before and after applying bias correction and Bayesian model averaging (BMA). The 13-member Stony Brook University (SBU) ensemble at 0000 UTC is combined with the 21-member National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Short-Range Ensemble Forecast (SREF) system at 2100 UTC. The ensemble is verified using 2-m temperature and 10-m wind speed for the 2007–09 warm seasons, and for subsets of days with high ozone and high fire threat. The impacts of training period, bias-correction method, and BMA are...

This technical report responds to the recognition by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and the National Climate Assessment (NCA) of the importance of understanding how land use and land cover (LULC) affects weather and climate variability and change and how that variability and change affects LULC. Current published, peer-reviewed, scientific literature and supporting data from both existing and original sources forms the basis for this report’s assessment of the current state of knowledge regarding land change and climate interactions. The synthesis presented herein...

Harmonization is the process of making information and estimates comparable across administrative borders. The degree to which harmonization succeeds depends on many factors, including the conciseness of the definitions, the availability and quality of data, and the methods used to convert an estimate according to a local definition to an estimate according to the reference definition. Harmonization requires the availability and use of common reference definitions and methods for converting from estimates based on national definitions to estimates based on reference definitions. This...

For international reporting purposes, information on forest resources often has to be supplied according to international definitions. Nevertheless, the country reports of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005 indicate that countries either prefer to use their own forest definitions or use national classes of forest and other biomes as a basis for reclassification to resolve the discrepancy between national and international forest definitions. These preferences are due to the complexity encountered when dealing with the problem of transforming...

Preventing the establishment of invading pest species can be beneficial with respect to averting future environmental and economic impacts and also in preventing the accumulation of control costs. Allee effects play an important role in the dynamics of newly established, low-density populations by driving small populations into self-extinction, making Allee effects critical in influencing outcomes of eradication efforts. We consider interactions between management tactics in the presence of Allee effects to determine cost-effective and time-efficient combinations to achieve eradication by...

Characterizing the spatial distribution of tree mortality is critical to understanding forest dynamics, but empirical studies on these patterns under old-growth conditions are rare. This rarity is due in part to low mortality rates in old-growth forests, the study of which necessitates long observation periods, and the confounding influence of tree in-growth during such time spans. Here, we studied mortality of red pine (Pinus resinosa Ait.) in five old-growth stands in Minnesota, USA, demonstrating the use of preexisting information of cohort age structures to account for in-growth after...