Treesearch

New guidance for amped-up biosecurity warrants echoing to the wildlife management community via the magazine published through The Wildlife Society. Here, we highlight new, higher disinfectant concentrations to use to forestall inadvertent Bsal transmission and convey the importance of both disinfecting field gear and wearing gloves when handling reptiles owing to newly recognized non-native pathogens in North America.

This study addresses the growth and ecological importance of Albizia procera, a nonnative tree species, in urban environments. Four-year-old trees of this species grew in height at a rate of 2.2 m/yr (suppressed trees) to 4.4 to 5.7 m/yr (dominant trees) and exhibited a mean basal area of 45.01 to 93.62 cm2/tree after 2 and 4 years of age, respectively. At two years of age trees formed a stand with a density of 5,755 trees/ha and a basal area of 27.2 m2/ha. At four years of age the tree density was 5,373 trees/ha, and the basal area increased to 54.3 m2/ha. These high growth rates were...

The principal findings of the 10th forest survey of Arkansas are presented. The survey examines trends between the 2010 and 2015 surveys. Topics examined include forest area, ownership, forest-type groups, stand structure, basal area, timber volume, growth, removals, mortality, and forest plantations

The presence and abundance of organisms within an ecosystem often correlate with habitat variables that may have few, or unknown, functional values. Understanding the functional role of these variables is especially important for organisms occupying landscapes managed for timber production and containing diverse habitat patches of different quantities and structures of vegetation. We investigated the strength of associations reported in the literature between small mammal generalists and vegetation. On an industrially logged landscape in northern CA, we used occupancy and mark-recapture...

Prescribed burning is a major source of a fine particular matter, especially in the southeastern United States, and quantifying emissions from burning operations accurately is an integral part of ascertaining air quality impacts. For instance, a critical factor in calculating fire emissions is identifying fire activity information (e.g., location, date/time, fire type, and area burned) and prior estimations of prescribed fire activity used for calculating emissions have either used burn permit records or satellite-based remote sensing products. While burn permit records kept by state...

Context Tidal saline wetlands (TSWs) are highly threatened from climate-change effects of sea-level rise. Studies of TSWs along the East Coast U.S. and elsewhere suggest significant likely losses over coming decades but needed are analytic tools gauged to Pacific Coast U.S. wetlands. Objectives We predict the impacts of sea-level rise (SLR) on the elevation capital (vertical) and migration potential (lateral) resilience of TSWs along the Pacific Coast U.S. over the period 2020 to 2150 under a 1.5-m SLR scenario, and identified TSWs at risk of most rapid loss of resilience. Here, we define...

Predation is an important species interaction to monitor when assessing an invasive species’ impact on a particular ecosystem, but it can be difficult to observe and thus, fully understand. On Kaua’i island, invasive Barn Owls (Tyto alba) predate native seabirds, but difficult terrain in this region and the cryptic nature of owl predation make traditional monitoring of predation quite challenging. Using Barn Owls collected as part of removal efforts on Kaua’i and Lehua islands, we conducted DNA metabarcoding of owl digestive tracts to detect and determine seabird species they predate. We...

Landscape-scale forest restoration aims to restore ecological structure and function and provide habitat for wildlife. However, forest management likely has varying impacts across wildlife life stages, with consequences for population persistence. Using 10 years of nest (n = 294) survey data for a focal bird species, white-headed woodpecker (Dryobates albolarvatus), we assessed how forest management (tree removal and prescribed burning) at two spatial scales (stand [2.25 ha] and landscape [314 ha]), forest vegetation variables at three spatial scales (nest tree, local [0.4 ha], and...

Environmental justice is an important component of sustainable tourism, but stakeholder perspectives related to environmental justice may vary. Using Q-methodology, we investigated different stakeholder perceptions related to environmental justice within the context of tourism and ecological restoration. Specifically, in the Erhai Lake basin, China, we explore perspectives around an ecological restoration effort that included the government mandated closure of 1900 establishments (inns and restaurants) in response to environmental degradation. We identify and explore four environmental...

Global commitments to mitigating climate change and halting biodiversity loss require reliable information about Earth’s ecosystems. Increasingly, such information is obtained from multiple sources of remotely sensed data combined with data acquired in the field. This new wealth of data poses challenges regarding the combination of different data sources to derive the required information and assess uncertainties. In this article, we show how predictors and their variances can be derived when hierarchically nested models are applied. Previous studies have developed methods for cases...