Treesearch

Forest management practices designed to meet varied landowner objectives affect wildlife habitat and may interrupt the life-cycle stages of disease vectors, including the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis Say (Acari: Ixodidae). Ixodes scapularis transmits multiple pathogens including Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease, which is the most common tick-borne disease in the United States. There is evidence that a range of active forest management practices (e.g., invasive plant removal, prescribed burning) can alter tick densities and pathogen transmission. However,...

Understanding the complexity of forest community dynamics is essential in forest management planning and stewardship, yet lowland northern white-cedar (Thuja occidentalis L.) are often managed as homogenous communities. Through this study, we defned lowland white-cedar forest community types in unharvested and harvested forest stands within the State of Michigan and examined community type associations with ecological variables. Data collected in unharvested stands revealed three whitecedar community subtypes: (1) cedar-deciduous, (2) cedar-conifer, and (3) cedar-shrub. These unharvested...

Urban tree planting initiatives (TPIs) have become a prominent form of public work that has the potential to increase the livability and sustainability of cities. However, if not sufficiently resourced and thoughtfully planned and implemented, these high-profile programs may fail to achieve intended goals. To promote successful implementation of TPIs, we offer recommendations for the pre-planting, installation, and postplanting phases. During each of these phases we present five cross-cutting themes: ensuring adequate funding for all project phases; cultivating place-based landscape...

A changing climate offers new opportunities to expand agriculture in northern latitudes, and understanding forest-to-agriculture land conversion impacts is critical to ensure soil sustainability. Using the Comprehensive Assessment of Soil Health (CASH) framework, we identified a minimum suite of indicators with little collinearity to reliably predict soil impacts during the conversion of boreal forest to agriculture and a time since conversion gradient (forest, <10 years, >10 and <50 years, and >50 years since conversion). We sampled paired forest and agricultural sites and used multiple...

An integrated system contains a unified mathematical structure for modeling tree and stand growth that can be applied at any level of resolution. This paper outlines the recent progress that has made this concept a reality: 1) the integrated system is based on a whole-stand growth model; 2) given a tree list, an individual-tree growth model can be derived from the stand model; 3) a diameter distribution (e.g., Weibull) can be partitioned into individual trees, which can be grown according to the tree growth model from 2) and 4) a stand table can be converted into a tree list, which can be...

Treeline studies are often motivated by the general assumption that cold distribution limits of the lifeform tree represent a universal biogeographic margin that is particularly sensitive to recent global warming. But the existing body of scientific literature is less consistent and raises more questions than it provides answers. Not only is the rate of treeline advancement in response to rising temperatures poorly understood, but interactions between biotic and abiotic drivers of treeline dynamics, as well as ecological mechanisms behind surprisingly stable treeline positions also remain...

Periodical cicadas live 13 or 17 years underground as nymphs, then emerge in synchrony as adults to reproduce. Developmentally synchronized populations called broods rarely coexist, with one dominant brood locally excluding those that emerge in off years. Twelvemodern 17-year cicada broods are believed to have descended from only three ancestral broods following the last glaciation. Themechanisms by which these daughter broods overcame exclusion by the ancestral brood to synchronously emerge in a different year, however, are elusive. Here, we demonstrate that temporal variation in the...

Within governance agencies, academia, and communities alike, there are increasing calls to recognize the value and importance of culture within social-ecological systems and to better implement Indigenous sciences in research, policy, and management. Efforts thus far have raised questions about the best ethical practices to do so. Engaging with plural worldviews and perspectives on their own terms reflects cultural evolutionary processes driving paradigm shifts in 3 fundamental areas of natural resource management: conceptualizations of natural resources and ecosystems, processes of public...

The ability of some white rot basidiomycetes to remove lignin selectively from wood indicates that low molecular weight oxidants have a role in ligninolysis. These oxidants are likely free radicals generated by fungal peroxidases from compounds in the biodegrading wood. Past work supports a role for manganese peroxidases (MnPs) in the production of ligninolytic oxidants from fungal membrane lipids. However, the fatty acid alkylperoxyl radicals initially formed during this process are not reactive enough to attack the major structures in lignin. Here, we evaluate the hypothesis that the...

The widely used high-density polyethylene (HDPE) polymer has inadequate mechanical and thermal properties for structural applications. To overcome this challenge, nano zinc oxide (ZnO) and nano boron oxide (B2O3) doped lignin-containing cellulose nanocrystals (L-CNC) were blended in the polymer matrix. The working hypothesis is that lignin will prevent CNC aggregation, and metal oxides will reduce the flammability of polymers by modifying their degradation pathways. This research prepared and incorporated safe, effective, and eco-friendly hybrid systems of nano ZnO/L-CNC and nano B2O3/L-CNC...