Treesearch

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had a dramatic impact on Ukrainian forestry and forest resources. In this situation, the ability of the National Forest Inventory (NFI) to update forest information at the state level is very limited due to the large territory which is inaccessible for field data collection. This study presents an approach for the combined use of different sources of field observations and remotely-sensed forest vegetation imagery to produce a time series (TS) to characterize forest conditions and changes across Ukraine. First, we created a forest...

Measuring water use in co-occurring loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) and shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata Mill.) enhances our understanding of their competitive water use and aids in refining watershed water budget model parameters. This study was conducted in a 12-ha forested headwater catchment in the Piedmont of North Carolina, southeastern U.S., from 2018 to 2019 (pre-thinning) to 2020 (post-thinning). Sap flux density (J s), species-level transpiration (T s), and watershed-level transpiration (T w) were quantified. Water use efficiency (WUE) in loblolly and shortleaf pines was compared,...

The REPLANT Act, part of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, directs the Forest Service to plant more than a billion trees on 4 million acres of deforested national forest lands over the next decade. Most of these lands were burned by severe wildfire, and are not reforesting naturally due to a lack of seed sources and unfavorable climatic conditions. Currently, there are several bottlenecks in the planting pipeline, so maximizing the survival and growth of seedlings is critical.

In 2003–2004, a trapping study with multiple-funnel traps was conducted in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Louisiana to evaluate the effects of the bark beetle pheromones ipsenol, ipsdienol, and lanierone on catches of bark beetles and associated species. The results on bark and ambrosia beetles have been reported previously. Herein, we report on the responses of predators in the same study. Ipsenol and/or ipsdienol attracted several species of coleopteran predators: Enoclerus nigripes (Say) (Cleridae); Temnoscheila virescens (F.) (Trogossitidae); Lasconotus species (Zopheridae);...

Estimating the abundance of unmarked animal populations from acoustic data is challenging due to the inability to identify individuals and the need to adjust for observation biases including detectability (false negatives), species misclassification (false positives), and sampling exposure. Acoustic surveys conducted along mobile transects were designed to avoid counting individuals more than once, where raw counts are commonly treated as an index of abundance. More recently, false-positive abundance models have been developed to estimate abundance while accounting for imperfect detection...

Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) is a conifer historically associated with an open forest ecosystem that extended across much of the coastal plain of the Southeastern United States. It now exists mainly in isolated fragments following the conversion of forests and the long-term disruption of the low-intensity fire regime upon which the species depends. Recent decades have seen efforts to restore longleaf pine forests by government and private landowners. This was reflected in analyses of national forest inventory data during two time periods, ca. 2009–2015 and 2016–2021, that showed...

The effects of timber harvest practices and climate change have altered forest ecosystems in southeast Alaska. However, quantification of patterns and trends in stream habitats associated with these forests is limited owing to a paucity of data available in remote watersheds. Here, we analyzed a 30-year dataset from southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to understand how these factors shape stream habitats. First, we examined differences between broad management classes (i.e., harvested and non-harvested) that have been used to guide stream channel restoration goals. Second, we...

DNA barcoding is commonly used for species identification. Despite this, there has not been a comprehensive assessment of the utility of DNA barcoding in crayfishes (Decapoda: Astacidea). Here we examined the extent to which local barcoding gaps (used for species identification) and global barcoding gaps (used for species discovery) exist among crayfishes, and whether global gaps met a previously suggested 10× threshold (mean interspecific difference being 10× larger than mean intra specific difference). We examined barcoding gaps using publicly available mitochondrial COI sequence data...

Limber pine is an ecologically vital species that provides food for wildlife, facilitates the establishment of other tree species, and grows where other species struggle. A nonnative disease, white pine blister rust (WPBR), and native bark beetles are killing limber pines faster than they can grow back.