Treesearch

Hydrology and meteorological data from relatively undisturbed watersheds aid in identifying effects on ecosystem services, tracking hydroclimatic trends, and reducing model uncertainties. Sustainable forest, water, and infrastructure management depends on assessing the impacts of extreme events and land use change on flooding, droughts, and biogeochemical processes. For example, global climate models predict more frequent high-intensity storms and longer dry periods for the southeastern USA. We summarized 17 years (2005–2021) of hydrometeorological data recorded in the 52 km2, third-order...

Human settlement has historically degraded floodplains and valley floors by introducing structures, such as dikes and dams, to control water flow and steer flooding away from areas where people live and work. In the past decade, land managers in the Pacific Northwest have devised projects to reconnect rivers with their floodplains. They’ve designed these projects to increase the abundance and diversity of freshwater organisms by increasing habitat complexity. To further understand this new rehabilitation method, scientists from the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station...

Interest in replacing monocultures with species diverse stands has steadily grown. Mixedwoods (stands containing a balance of conifer and hardwood species) represent an alternative to monocultures and occur naturally through forest succession on most sites in eastern North America. In the central and southeastern United States, mixedwoods were generally dominated by pine and upland oak species. However, a combination of anthropogenic land use legacies has allowed fire-sensitive species to establish creating an opportunity for different mixedwood types to develop (e.g., pine-oak, pine-poplar...

Public lands are an important source of outdoor recreation opportunities. These opportunities provide a variety of public benefits, including promoting physical and mental well-being, contributing to local economies, and raising conservation awareness. In response to current and potential demand, it is ever more important to meet and anticipate infrastructure and user needs. With aging infrastructure (e.g., trails, access points, parking lots), managers face the need to maintain ex­isting, and establish new, recreation opportunities to meet user expectations and contribute to positive...

Climate change poses a significant threat to the resilience and sustainability of forest ecosystems. This study examines the performance of white oak (Quercus alba, L.) across a range of provenances in a common garden planting, focusing on the species’ response to climatic variables and the potential role of assisted migration in forest management. We evaluated the survival and growth rates of white oak provenances originating from various points along a latitudinal gradient over a period of 40 years. These provenances were planted in a common garden situated near the midpoint of this...

On Earth Day, 2022, the White House issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to inventory the mature and old-growth forests on Federal lands, to complete this inventory within a year of the order, and to make it available to the public. This order extended from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (i.e., the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act 2021), which invested $5.5 billion over 5 years to address some of the USDA Forest Service’s most pressing issues, including the increased risk of wildland fire, ecosystem restoration, and the conservation of old-growth forests. To...

Freshwater mussel declines range from dramatic to subtle, but there are few methods for quantifying the extent of decline and overall assemblage health. Available assessment tools are specific to particular streams or regions and depend on untested assumptions or subjective assessments of species’ tolerance to various factors. We developed a broadly applicable, objective mussel assemblage health index (MAHI). We compiled a dataset of mussel survey data from 50 streams across eastern North America and evaluated the ability of 19 candidate metrics to discriminate healthy and degraded...

This paper proposes a surveillance model for plant pests that can optimally allocate resources among survey tools with varying properties. While some survey tools are highly specific for the detection of a single pest species, others are more generalized. There is considerable variation in the cost and sensitivity of these tools, but there are no guidelines or frameworks for identifying which tools are most cost-effective when used in surveillance programs that target the detection of newly invaded populations. To address this gap, we applied our model to design a trapping surveillance...

Tree mortality due to global change—including range expansion of invasive pests and pathogens—is a paramount threat to forest ecosystems. Oak forests are among the most prevalent and valuable ecosystems both ecologically and economically in the United States. There is increasing interest in monitoring oak decline and death due to both drought and the oak wilt pathogen (Bretziella fagacearum). We combined anatomical and ecophysiological measurements with spectroscopy at leaf, canopy, and airborne levels to enable differentiation of oak wilt and drought, and detection prior to visible...

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and Research Data Librarians collaborated with an international research team of conservation geneticists to create an instructional and practical guide combining genetic biodiversity initiatives and data curation. Over the course of two months, the academic librarians held multiple community-based Curate-A-Thons where an international group of students, researchers, librarians, and faculty researchers participated in tracking down publications and metadata for genomic sequence data, thus crowd-sourcing this effort of metadata...