Treesearch

Artificial intelligence-based large language models (LLMs) have the potential to substantially improve the efficiency and scale of ecological research, but their propensity for delivering incorrect information raises significant concern about their usefulness in their current state. Here, we formally test how quickly and accurately an LLM performs in comparison to a human reviewer when tasked with extracting various types of ecological data from the scientific literature. We found the LLM was able to extract relevant data over 50 times faster than the reviewer and had very high accuracy...

Climate change is expected to alter many aspects of forest ecosystems. Among these changes, tree species ranges are projected to shift northward and upslope in response to warming temperatures and altered precipitation patterns. Unfortunately, natural seed dispersal and plant migration rates dramatically lag behind the pace of climate change.

The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, implements the Nation’s only comprehensive inventory of forest resources across all ownerships. Through its continuous forest monitoring, FIA provides strategic- level information necessary to evaluate the status and changing trends in forest resources and the sustainability of forest management practices; FIA data serve as the foundation for a broad array of scientific studies. These proceedings report findings from invited and contributed presentations and posters from the 15th biennial...

We conducted a high-resolution study of lead in an urban moss, Orthotrichum lyellii, to better understand lead distributions and sources in Portland, Oregon (United States). The outdoor lead landscape is found to be heterogenous, with lead concentrations varying with age of neighborhood: on average 8.3× and 19× the rural background in newer (≥1948) and older neighborhoods (≤1915), respectively. This study finds leaded gasoline to be a pervasive and persistent lead source, decades after the complete phase out of leaded gasoline use by on-road vehicles. The highest lead levels, up to 590×...

Fine-scale spatial climate variation fosters biodiversity and buffers it from climate change, but ecological studies are constrained by the limited accessibility of relevant fine-scale climate data. In this paper we introduce a novel form of species distribution model that uses species occurrences to predict high-resolution climate variation. This new category of ‘bioclimate' data, representing micro-scale climate as experienced by one or more species of interest, is a useful complement to microclimate data from existing approaches. The modeling method, called BISHOP for ‘bioclimate...

Model-assisted, two-stage forest survey sampling designs provide a means to combine airborne remote sensing data, collected in a sampling mode, with field plot data to increase the precision of national forest inventory estimates, while maintaining important properties of design-based inventories, such as unbiased estimation and quantification of uncertainty. In this study, we present a comprehensive set of model-assisted estimators for domain-level attributes in a two-stage sampling design, including new estimators for densities, and compare the performance of these estimators with...

The dominant paradigm for assessing ecological responses to climate change assumes that future states of individuals and populations can be predicted by current, species-wide performance variation across spatial climatic gradients. However, if the fates of ecological systems are better predicted by past responses to in situ climatic variation through time, this current analytical paradigm may be severely misleading. Empirically testing whether spatial or temporal climate responses better predict how species respond to climate change has been elusive, largely due to restrictive data...

Variable radius plot surveys can require updated estimates when the quality of previous estimates have declined over time. We developed a statistical estimator for this purpose that is the product of two estimators, one estimator is for the updated volume-to-basal-area ratio and the other estimator is for the updated basal area. Our estimator relies only on the surveyor identifying previously measured trees and does not require the identification of ingrowth, which simplifies its application. We also propose a variance estimator that relies on the bootstrap method. We investigate the point...

Plant litter decomposition is driven by soil biota and biophysiochemical conditions as well as substrate quality. Prescribed burns can affect the abundance and diversity of soil arthropods and the biophysiochemical conditions in terrestrial ecosystems. In this study, we examined the effects of a prescribed burn on soil arthropods and litter chemistry in decomposing litter during a total of 469-days field incubation using litter from two grasses, Dichanthium annulatum and Megathyrsus maximus, in a subtropical moist pastureland of Puerto Rico. We found the prescribed burn substantially...

Alaska’s boreal forests are experiencing rapid changes in climate that may favor deciduous-dominated systems, with important implications for global biogeochemical and energy cycles. However, aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) has experienced substantial defoliation from the aspen leaf miner (Phyllocnistis populiella Cham., hereafter ALM) in Alaska, resulting in significant growth reductions. We conducted a tree-ring and Δ13C study to test the hypothesis that moisture limitation may have predisposed aspen to leaf miner damage. Contrary to our hypothesis, differences in climate-growth...