Treesearch

The second full annual inventory of Wisconsin's forests reports more than 16.7 million acres of forest land with an average volume of more than 1,400 cubic feet per acre. Forest land is dominated by the oak/hickory forest-type group, which occupies slightly more than one quarter of the total forest land area; the maple/beech/birch forest-type group occupies an additional 23 percent. Forty-two percent of forest land consists of large diameter stands, 23 percent contains medium diameter stands, and 8 percent contains small diameter stands. The volume of growing stock on timberland has been...

Northern white-cedar (eastern white cedar; Thuja occidentalis L.) is an important tree species in the northeastern United States and adjacent Canada, occurring both in pure stands and as a minor species in mixed stands of hardwoods or other softwoods. Yet practitioners have little and often contradictory information about cedar ecology and silviculture. In response to this information need, a group of university and government researchers in the United States and Canada embarked on more than a decade of collaborative research; this guide is a compilation of the knowledge generated by that...

Introduction to Special Issue on Urban Tree Growth & Longevity

Forest restoration projects have become increasingly common around the world and planting trees is almost always a key component. Low seedling survival and growth may result in restoration failures and various mechanical site preparation techniques for treatment of soils and vegetation are important tools used to help counteract this. In this article, we synthesize the current state-of-knowledge concerning mechanical site preparation for improved tree establishment when carried out in different forest restoration situations, point out critical research gaps and provide some recommendations...

The colonial history of North America presents a contrast between Mexico and the two predominantly English-speaking countries, the United States and Canada. In Mexico, indigenous and other local communities own considerable forested lands, a consequence of the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century. In the United States, forest land is now primarily in private or federal hands, while in Canada forest land is primarily managed by the provinces. In all three countries, traditional knowledge had little effect upon forestry until the end of the twentieth century. In Mexico and the...

Understanding the longevity of fuel treatments in terms of their ability to maintain fire behavior and effects within a desired range is an important question. The objective of this study was to determine how fuels, forest structure, and predicted fire behavior changed 7-years after initial treatments. Three different treatments: mechanical only, mechanical plus fire, and prescribed fire only, as well as untreated control, were each randomly applied to 3 of 12 experimental units. Many aspects of the initial fuel treatments changed in 7 years. The overall hazard of the control units...

Climate change and its effects are writ large across wilderness landscapes. They always have been and always will be (see Figure 1). But contemporary change is different. For the first time, the pace and direction of climate change appear to be driven significantly by human activities (IPCC 2007), and this change is playing out across landscapes already affected by other anthropogenic stressors - pollution, invasive species, altered disturbance regimes, and land fragmentation (Cole, Millar, and Stephenson 2010). This raises serious questions about how wilderness stewards should respond to...

This study evaluated the influence of planting sites on the establishment and ectomycorrhizal (ECM) colonization of American chestnut (Castanea denetata (Marsh.) Borkh.) on an abandoned coal mine in an Appalachian region of the United States. Root morphotyping and sequencing of the fungal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region were used to identify the ECM species associated with the chestnut seedlings. Germination, survival, ECM root colonization, and growth were assessed in three habitats: forest edge, center (plots without vegetation), and pine plots (a 10-year-old planting of Pinus...

A critical component of a growth and yield simulator is an estimate of mortality rates. The mortality models presented here are developed from long-term permanent plots in provinces from throughout the geographic range of ponderosa pine in the United States extending from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Pacific Coast. The study had two objectives: estimation of the probability of a tree survival for the next 5 years and the probability of a tree surviving longer than a given time period (survival trend) for a given set of covariates. The probability of a tree surviving for the next...

Our Wilderness Act in the United States, passed in 1964, provides a fairly distinct definition of wilderness for the part of society that was successful in parlaying their values, recreation motivations, and political influence into an extremely effective, world-recognized conservation program. But relationships with our National Wilderness Preservation System extend well beyond the typical recreation visitor we might encounter in these areas. For example, due to growing recognition of the downstream importance of protected headwaters of important rivers, and the need for climate change...