Treesearch

A large share of the land in the United States is public. Public and government access to these lands have major implications for their management and recreational use as well as surrounding privately owned lands. Because of historical policies related to the distribution of public land, the government manages countless areas of inaccessible land that are commonly referred to as “stranded public lands.” This stranded public land has been shown to decrease county-level property values and has resulted in a higher risk of wildfire. However, past studies have focused on county-level informatio...

Significant research has been conducted on the development and use of hardwood resources in engineered wood materials and products. This research focused on utilizing undervalued hardwoods for applications that take advantage of their excellent strength properties. Some of the results from this research have been implemented by industry, and additional research has been initiated and is on-going. To bring together industry leaders and scientists, Mississippi State University and the USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory, led a workshop on this topic in 2023. The objectives of the...

Understanding space-use dynamics of wildlife populations is important for informing habitat management and restoration initiatives. In West Virginia, Clemmys guttata (Spotted Turtle) is restricted to the eastern panhandle region and is considered a species of greatest conservation need. The West Virginia Division of Natural Resources is interested in managing and restoring Spotted Turtle habitat, but information on space use is limited. To address this information gap, we used radiotelemetry to track space-use patterns of 9 Spotted Turtles at 2 sites that represent different wetland types...

Wisconsin encompasses a substantial portion of the Upper Midwest distribution for the globally endangered Glyptemys insculpta (Wood Turtle). However, the paucity of prior research and population monitoring statewide has limited our understanding of their status and population trends in the state. To address this information gap, we conducted standardized Wood Turtle population surveys at 50 sites across 8 HUC-8 watersheds in Wisconsin from 2018 to 2023 to estimate adult abundance and population demographic parameters. We captured turtles at 29 of 50 sites, and detected 250 unique individual...

Archaea, bacteria, fungi, and viruses are organisms that comprise the soil microbiome and play a crucial role in the health of the world’s forests. The soil microbiome is vital in cycling important nutrients needed by vegetation (e.g., nitrogen), stabilizing soil organic matter, and forming essential symbioses with plants, such as the ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF) that are obligate symbiotic partners of the conifer tree species that dominate forests of western North America.

Asian bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) is a widespread, invasive, twining vine in eastern North American forests. Factors associated with its local occurrence are well known but seldom reported at geographic scales coarser than research locations. We evaluated its occurrence across a hierarchy of land units ranging from coarse (provinces), intermediate (landscapes), and fine (site) scales in North Carolina and Virginia. Chi-square tests indicated a significant difference in the proportion of plots with C. orbiculatus in mountain (5.5%) compared to piedmont (9.9%) provinces. Using groups...

After felling, skidding, delimbing and often topping, and merchandizing of trees, logs must be loaded onto a truck for the hauling of that raw woody resource to a mill. This analysis focuses on owner-operator truck drivers, or self-employed drivers, and looks at the impacts of costs per gallon of diesel ($3, $4, $5, and $6 per gallon), different log truck annual insurance rates ($10,000, $15,000, and $22,000), along with basic assumptions about hauling conditions and maintenance costs, and varying rates of salary received per load ($0.13 to $0.23 per ton per loaded mile, by $0.02 increments...

The Southwide Pine Seed Source Study (SPSSS) provided a tremendous amount of information from its inception in the early 1950s until its conclusion decades later. The silvicultural value of this genetics study, even given some design weaknesses and other limitations, continues to this day and these data will soon be available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service’s Research Data Archive. However, while preparing these data, we discovered in the original study plan documentation that most of the geographic coordinates provided for the seed sources were erroneously...