Treesearch

Urbanisation, as a global driver of change, modifies the natural environment with well-known consequences to biological communities. Under natural conditions, vegetation drives soil processes in concert with the soil microbial community in their rhizosphere. It remains unclear whether and how vegetation influences these communities in heavily disturbed urban systems where many ecosystem services are also strictly linked to soils and their biota. Here, we used amplicon sequencing and GeoChip arrays to study soil microbiota responses to urbanisation and tree functional types across climatic...

Background: Forests are significant terrestrial biomes for carbon storage, and annual carbon accumulation of forest biomass contributes offsets affecting net greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The immediate loss of stored carbon through fire on forest lands reduces the annual offsets provided by forests. As such, the United States reporting includes annual estimates of direct fire emissions in conjunction with the overall forest stock and change estimates as a part of national greenhouse gas inventories within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Forest fire emissions...

This resource update is a brief look at some of the basic metrics that describe the status of and changes to forest resources in Arkansas. Estimates presented are for the 2023 survey year with resource changes compared to the 2022 survey year (Rosson 2024). This information is based on field data collected using the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) annualized sample design, and it is updated yearly. Arkansas has about 5,700 sample plots across the State; each year, 20 percent of these plots (one panel) are visited and measured by field...

Survival analysis is composed of a group of analytical approaches that can be used to predict the occurrence of harvest activities, which provides insightful information about the dynamics of natural resources utilization in a region. Recently, random survival forest (RSF) has been proposed in survival analysis to capture the complex relationships among variables. The main objective of this study was to employ the RSF algorithm to examine the temporal evolution of tree harvest, accounting for stand and environmental variables. Specifically, the predictability of the RSF model was compared...

Forest managers require climate adaptation strategies that are regionally relevant and translatable into planning processes. Adaptation frameworks, such as the resistance, resilience, transition framework, can guide the development of these strategies. However, there are limited examples of how these concepts can be operationalized with concomitant estimates of changes in forest structural complexity and diversity, which may support adaptive capacity. To address this knowledge gap, two operational-scale, replicated experiments were studied to understand how application of the resistance,...

The proportion of people living in urban areas is growing globally. Understanding how to manage urban biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and ecosystem services is becoming more important. Biodiversity can increase ecosystem functioning in non-urban systems. However, few studies have reviewed the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in urban areas, which differ in species compositions, abiotic environments, food webs, and turnover rates. We reviewed evidence of biodiversity–ecosystem functioning relationships in urban environments and assessed factors that influence...

The Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis Motschulsky) poses a significant ecological and economic threat to forested landscapes. Based on the potential cost of uncontrolled infestations, countries in North America and Europe have adopted polices of eradication when breeding populations are found. In the absence of effective traps and remote sensing tools, eradication programs depend on the use of effort intensive visual surveys to identify and remove individual infested host trees. The risk of infestation on the landscape changes as surveys are conducted (reducing risk) and...

Exports of wood pellet from the southern United States (US) have surged significantly in the last decade to meet renewable energy requirements set by the Renewable Energy Directives in European Union nations. Several export-oriented industrial wood pellet production facilities have been established across the southern US, which utilize a significant amount of woody feedstock including roundwood stumpage. We employ quasi-experimental causal inference approaches to assess the impacts of the growing wood pellet production on pine and hardwood pulpwood feedstock markets in 39 wood basins...