Treesearch

Every time a watercraft moves from one lake to another, it could potentially carry an aquatic invasive species (AIS) attached to the exterior, in bilge water, or in bait buckets. Aquatic invasive species can cause ecological and economic damage by degrading water quality, which in turn can harm fisheries, native species, and human health. Invasive species may also interfere with human use of lakes and lead to lower property values. Eradicating aquatic invasive species from an infested waterbody is nearly impossible, so water managers typically focus on prevention through inspection.

The groundlayer flora has a disproportionate influence on ecosystem function and contributes to the biodiversity in temperate Quercus forests of eastern North America. Historically open understory conditions perpetuated, in part by fire, have become closed and homogenized by long-term fire exclusion, likely impacting the groundlayer community. We explored the effects of burn season (unburned = CON, dormant season = DSB, growing season = GSB) on groundlayer (<1 m) vegetation attributes pre- and post-burn. The difference (post-burn – pre-burn) in tree cover was greater in GSB (+8.22%) than...

Soil organic matter decomposition and its interactions with climate depend on whether the organic matter is associated with soil minerals. However, data limitations have hindered global-scale analyses of mineral-associated and particulate soil organic carbon pools and their benchmarking in Earth system models used to estimate carbon cycle-climate feedbacks. Here we analyse observationally derived global estimates of soil carbon pools to quantify their relative proportions and compute their climatological temperature sensitivities as the decline in carbon with increasing temperature. We...

The USFS Geospatial Technology and Applications Center (GTAC) and the International Institute of Tropical Forestry partnered to develop a workflow that produces high-resolution tree canopy cover data using available lidar data and USFS Enterprise software. GTAC implemented this workflow across 2016 and 2018 lidar data acquisitions for Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands, resulting in 1 meter spatial resolution tree canopy cover data. This publication documents the workflow used to create this datasets and presents percent canopy cover for Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

United States federal lands are managed for multiple conservation, social, and commercial goals shaped by the visions of diverse interest groups. The rural economic and food-security needs of local public-lands-based communities have important implications for sustainable natural-resource management but can be obscured by national-scale public comment processes. To better understand local concerns and aspirations for management of the nation’s largest national forest, the Tongass, we use thematic analysis of public testimonies provided by Southeast Alaska community members as part of the...

Fiorinia externa Ferris, elongate hemlock scale, was inadvertently introduced to North America from Japan. This insect is particularly problematic on hemlock, Tsuga spp., though it has been reported in association with several other conifers. The evidence that other conifers might be hosts, capable of supporting growing populations of the insect, has not been previously reviewed. Our review confirms that F. externa is an oligophagous pest of members of Pinaceae. Although species of Cupressaceae and Taxaceae have been reported as hosts of F. externa, they seem unable to support population...

Forecasting the response of vegetation to climate change and human actions at global to landscape scales often relies on system models. Many such models represent the composition and demography of vegetation using age class cohorts of species or vegetation types. Forest landscape models (FLM) simulate spatially explicit forest dynamics in response to disturbance and abiotic drivers and constraints at landscape spatial and temporal scales (105 – 108 ha, hundreds of years), and many represent trees as species-age cohorts on a grid of cells to make the model tractable at landscape scales....

Exposure to urban trees is associated with improved public health outcomes, including healthier infant birth weights, fewer symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and decreased cardiovascular mortality. Conversely, tree loss is linked to increased rates of cardiovascular disease and higher mortality. Could this mean that trees save lives? Using 30 years of tree planting data generated by Friends of Trees, a nonprofit organization that has planted trees throughout Portland, Oregon, researchers with the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and colleagues...

Forest carbon stock changes are routinely reported at the national level. Such accounting usually includes carbonsequestered by live trees and stored in living and dead trees, litter, and soil. The carbon stored in harvested wood products(HWPs), while in use and after disposal, may also be reported. However, wood products may provide a further indirectcarbon benefit by providing an alternative to materials that require relatively large inputs of fossil-derived carbon. This"substitution impact" of HWPs is not explicitly considered in national reporting for forest carbon accounts because it...

We address the concerns that managed forest plantations may cause reductions of diversity of understory vegetation. We performed inventories of two mature ponderosa pine plantations in which multiple treatments were applied during plantation establishment. At stand age 35, we measured tree heights and diameters, understory plant cover and diversity, soil nutrients and chemical properties, and soil microbial biomass and diversity with phospholipid fatty acid. We found a significant, positive effect from both herbicide (H) and fertilizer (F) applications on subsequent overstory tree growth...