Treesearch

Kirtland's warblers primarily nest in northern Lower Michigan and mostly winter in the central islands of The Bahamas. They were federally delisted under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in October 2019 after 60 years of conservation and management efforts. A search was conducted for all available literature pertaining to Kirtland’s warblers, including historical and current information on conservation efforts, published scientific articles, dissertations, books, newspaper articles, unpublished agency reports and observation data, and personal correspondences pertaining to management. An...

Millions of acres of public and private land in the United States are at risk of losing the native plant communities that are central to the integrity of ecosystems. As plant communities decline, the biodiversity they embody is also being rapidly lost, along with a wealth of ecosystem goods and services important to society. There is a long and growing list of threats to plant communities-invasive species, overgrazing, climate change, and altered fire regimes, to name a few, that have collectively accelerated the deterioration of natural landscapes across the country.

Healthy forests are critically important for mitigating the effects of climate change, reducing biodiversity loss, and protecting our water resources. Decades of chronic underfunding combined with the worsening impacts of climate change and wildfire have increased the need for reforestation across the Western United States. This article highlights the challenges impacting tree-seed availability and suggests opportunities for strengthening the tree-seed supply chain to meet reforestation goals in an era of climate change. This paper was presented at The Reforestation Pipeline in the Western...

This report presents a comprehensive history of the Hugo Sauer Nursery and the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station, Institute for Applied Ecosystem Studies located near Rhinelander, Wisconsin from 1931 to 2023. It details the evolution of the nursery, which started as a Depression-era federal nursery created to reforest the national forests in the upper Midwest, became a state-operated nursery leased by the Wisconsin Conservation Department, and transformed into an experimental testing ground for cutting-edge forestry research. The establishment of the Institute of Forest...

This report is the fourth summary of annualized inventory of Pennsylvania with field data collected from 2013 through 2019. Forest land area has decreased since 2014 to 16.6 million acres. Oak/hickory and maple/beech/birch forest-type groups dominate the forested area and large-diameter stands account for 73 percent of timberland. Net volume on timberland is 37.3 billion cubic feet but increases have slowed due to decreased gross growth and increased mortality. Net growth still outpaced harvest removals by a ratio of 2.1:1. Additional information on forest area, land-use change, fragmentati...

Though ballistic projectile penetration of wood has been studied for centuries, standard models overestimate the thickness of wood required to stop projectiles, often by a large margin. Adhesive lamination via contemporary manufacturing methods can produce mass timber panels of unprecedented thickness, yet industry standard layups of softwood cross-laminated timber (CLT) cannot stop projectiles traveling at velocities specified by current protective design requirements. To develop mass timber panels that comprehensively mitigate blast, ballistic, and forced entry threats, seven reinforced...

A mass timber lateral force resisting system (LFRS) is proposed using a timber buckling restrained brace (TBRB) for improved seismic performance in high seismic applications. To develop a high-performance braced frame, it is essential to quantify the behaviour of the connections including failure modes and moment-rotation capacities. Cyclic and monotonic tests were conducted on six mass timber beam-column connections to investigate the response of mass timber joints connected with slotted-in steel plates and mild steel dowels. The goal of the subassembly tests was to measure the maximum...

Microtopography plays an important role in various ecological, hydrologic, and biogeochemical processes. However, quantifying the characteristics of microtopography represents a data-intensive challenge. Over the last decade, high-resolution or close-range remote sensing data and techniques have emerged as powerful tools to quantify microtopography. Traditional field surveys were mostly limited to transects or small plots, using limited sets of observations but with the decrease in the cost of close-range remote sensing technologies and the increase in computing performance, the microtopogr...

Within the global water cycle, the groundwater pool represents a substantial volume of water, containing approximately 8,000-23,000•103 km3 (Abbott et al., 2019). Annual groundwater discharge to the ocean (0.1e6.5•103 km3/year) is two to three orders of magnitude smaller than oceanic evaporation (350e510•103 km3/year), which initiates the continental part of the water cycle through atmospheric condensation and landward precipitation (88e120•103 km3/year). The other segments of the water cycle are part of our daily life: the clouds in the sky, the polar ice seen from satellites and the...

The importance of interactions among stream hydrology, morphology, and biology is well recognized in studies of stream ecosystems. However, when quantifying the impacts of altered flow on aquatic habitat, results are often based either on combined changes in topography and flow, or with altered flow over static topography. Here, we study the potential beneficial effects of restoring unregulated flows on salmonid habitat and separate the relative influences of changes in flow vs. topography. We hypothesize that flow restoration will increase topographic complexity and that the coevolution...