Treesearch

Increased water scarcity and drought frequency are creating water management challenges for many communities in the western U.S. In response, the Western Association of Agricultural Experiment Station Directors sponsored a virtual summit in August 2020 to develop a framework for identifying and addressing the most pressing water issues in the western United States (the West). Summit attendees were research scientists, university extension specialists and professionals, and federal/state agency representatives with knowledge and expertise of water management in the West. The summit elicited...

Agroforestry systems (AFS) are land management systems that encompass the deliberate integration of trees with crops or livestock, or both within a single management unit. When properly designed and actively managed, AFS are sustainable, productive and resilient systems that provide economic, social and environmental benefits to farmers, communities and society. These benefits accrue because well-adapted AFS utilize tree and crop species with complementary growth traits, chosen for their mutually beneficial interactions, which optimize the use of available natural resources, such as light,...

In wildland-urban interface areas, firefighters balance wildfire suppression and structure protection. These tasks are often performed under resource limitations, especially when many structures are at risk. To address this problem, wildland firefighters employ a process called “structure triage” to prioritize structure protection based on perceived defensibility. Using a dataset containing triage assessments of thousands of structures within the Western US, we developed a machine learning model that can improve the understanding of factors contributing to assessed structure defensibility....

The use of composite materials has seen many new innovations for a large variety of applications. The area of reinforcement in composites is also rapidly evolving with many new discoveries, including the use of hybrid fibers, sustainable materials, and nanocellulose. In this review, studies on hybrid fiber reinforcement, the use of nanocellulose, the use of nanocellulose in hybrid forms, the use of nanocellulose with other nanomaterials, the applications of these materials, and finally, the challenges and opportunities (including safety issues) of their use are thoroughly discussed. This...

Cotton is a natural fiber containing more than 95% of cellulose. With worldwide cotton consumption continuously increasing, the amount of cotton waste generated is enormous. Most of the cotton waste ends up in landfill or incinerators, resulting in a huge waste of this excellent natural resource. In this project, cotton waste was recycled to produce polypropylene nanocomposites. Instead of using the traditional two-step nanofiber extraction and compounding technique, an integrated process was adopted to combine nanofibrillation and compounding into one step. Results showed that cotton...

Regardless of their applications, polymers are still considered me­chanically weak and functionally insufficient for certain demanding coating and adhesive uses. To address those issues, nanomaterials have been extensively studied as reinforcing fillers, which have been proven to effectively promote the performance of polymer coatings/adhesives. However, conventional nanofillers are expen­sive and non-biodegradable. Meanwhile, cellulose nanomaterials (CNMs), a class of nanomaterials produced from biomass feedstocks, can circumvent the drawbacks of conventional nanofillers. This re­view...

Spatio-temporal models are widely used in many research areas from ecology to epidemiology. However, a limited number of computational tools are available for modeling river network datasets in space and time. In this paper, we introduce the R package SSNbayes for fitting Bayesian spatio-temporal models and making predictions on branching stream networks. SSNbayes provides a linear regression framework with multiple options for incorporating spatial and temporal autocorrelation. Spatial dependence is captured using stream distance and flow connectivity while temporal autocorrelation is...

To better understand the effects of wildfire on water quality, water and ash samples were collected at multiple stream and river locations following the Cameron Peak Fire. These sites included both burned and unburned parts of the Cache La Poudre watershed in northern Colorado. A series of benzene polycarboxylic acids (BPCAs), including benzene, naphthenic, and biphenyl polycarboxylic acids, were quantitatively measured in streamwater samples for their occurrence in the watersheds; numerous isomers were also detected. High-flow storm events, containing high concentrations of charred...

An unanswered question in conservation economics is how to leverage impact investing for the provision of ecosystem services. We develop and apply a general conceptual model of a diversified ecosystem service portfolio to highlight two key insights about which ecosystem services will attract impact investing. First, generating a positive expected return via markets or payments for ecosystem services is a necessary but insufficient condition to elicit impact investment in ecosystem services. Second, ecosystem services can show a new diversification value that increases the value of the...

Forest managers must balance multiple objectives and consider tradeoffs when developing a management plan. Complex interactions between successional dynamics and natural disturbances make it challenging, especially when decisions play out under the deep and dynamic uncertainties associated with climate change. Here we explored a suite of management strategies to maximize multiple management objectives and minimize tradeoffs under future climate projections and quantified the greatest sources of uncertainty. We used a spatially-explicit forest simulation model (LANDIS-II) to simulate the...