Treesearch

Extensive vegetation inventories established with a probabilistic design are an indispensable tool in describing distributions of species and community types and detecting changes in composition in response to climate or other drivers. The Forest Inventory and Analysis Program measures vegetation in permanent plots on forested lands across the United States of America (GIVD ID NA-US-001). Plot sizes and protocols for measuring tree species are standardized across the country. Additional standardized protocols have been implemented to measure the abundance of non-tree vascular plant and...

Random Forests is frequently used to model species distributions over large geographic areas. Complications arise when data used to train the models have been collected in stratified designs that involve different sampling intensity per stratum. The modeling process is further complicated if some of the target species are relatively rare on the landscape leading to an unbalanced number of presences and absences in the training data. We explored means to accommodate unequal sampling intensity across strata as well as the unbalanced species prevalence in Random Forest models for tree and...

Managers currently face the immense challenge of anticipating the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems and then developing and applying management responses for adapting forests to future conditions. The Climate Change Response Framework (CCRF) is a highly collaborative approach to helping land managers understand the potential effects of climate change on forest ecosystems and integrating climate change considerations into management.

A wealth of information is available on climate change adaptation, but much of it is very broad and of limited use at the finer spatial scales most relevant to land managers. This chapter contains a "menu" of adaptation actions and provides land managers in northern Wisconsin with a range of options to help forest ecosystems adapt to climate change impacts.

Climate change imposes many challenges on the long-term management of ecosystems and is becoming an increasingly important consideration in land management planning and decisionmaking at a variety of spatial scales. The process outlined in this chapter helps managers incorporate climate change considerations into management planning and activities, while complementing existing processes and procedures for making decisions.

In this chapter, we demonstrate how the Adaptation Workbook (Chapter 3) can be used with the Adaptation Strategies and Approaches (Chapter 2) to develop adaptation tactics for two real-world management issues. The two illustrations in this chapter are intended to provide helpful tips to managers completing the Adaptation Workbook, as well as to show how the anticipated impacts of climate change can be addressed during land management planning and activities.

More diverse sources of energy are needed for countries to progress toward energy independence and to meet future food production needs. The US Task Force on Strategic Unconventional Fuels concluded that to achieve this objective it is essential to develop a domestic unconventional fuels industry. Rangelands, which cover 50% to 70% of the earth's terrestrial surface and dominate much of the western half of the United States, represent a major source of alternative energy resources. A framework to systematically identify biophysical-socioeconomic links that influence the delivery of...

This paper establishes a chronological framework for selected pieces of Caribbean (Tafno/Lucayan) wooden sculpture, enabling previously ahistoric artefacts to fit back into the wider corpus of pre-colonial material culture. Seventy-two 14C AMS determinations from 56 artefacts held in museum collections are reported, including 32 ceremonial duhos, or seats. Far from being constrained to the last few centuries prior to contact, the dates for these objects extend back to ca. AD 250, and include the artistic legacies of various cultures. Duhos in both low and high back styles are present from...

Interest in renewable biomass for fuel, chemicals, and materials is high (e.g., Rocha et al. 2002), as many products currently derived from petrochemicals can be produced from biomass (Sims et al. 2006). Biomass can be converted into many energy products and chemicals: e.g., alcohol by fermenting cellulose, charcoal, bio-oil, and gases by biomass pyrolysis (Khesghi et al. 2000). Biomass and biofuels technologies with the most potential in the United States include co-firing in Coal-fired power plants, integrated gasification combined-cycle units in forestry, and ethanol from hydrolysis of...

Fusarium commune can cause damping-off and root rot of conifer seedlings in forest nurseries. The pathogen is only reported in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington within United States. Fusarium isolates were collected from midwestern and western United States to determine occurrence of this pathogen. DNA sequences of mitochondrial small subunit gene were used to identify F. commune. In addition to the aforementioned states, F. commune was found from nurseries in Nevada, Montana, Nebraska, and Michigan, USA.