Treesearch

Vacant and abandoned buildings are common features in many post-industrial US cities, and are consistent predictors of violence. Demolition programs are regularly employed as an urban land use policy to stabilize housing markets and mitigate public health problems including violence. The objective of this research was to examine the effect of vacant building removals on violent and property crimes in Baltimore, MD from 2014 to 2019. We conducted a differencein- differences analysis using spatio-temporal Bayesian mixed models on six crime types on block faces with and without building...

Is our logger population aging? What trends are we seeing in logging equipment? What business environment are loggers experiencing? What impact did the pandemic have on loggers? These are some of the questions we asked in the 2022 Loggers Survey. The results that we discuss come from loggers in Minnesota and Wisconsin. We asked our questions based on what they experienced during the previous year – 2021.

Plant cell walls represent the most abundant pool of organic carbon in terrestrial ecosystems but are highly recalcitrant to utilization by microbes and herbivores owing to the physical and chemical barrier provided by lignin biopolymers. Termites are a paradigmatic example of an organism’s having evolved the ability to substantially degrade lignified woody plants, yet atomic-scale characterization of lignin depolymerization by termites remains elusive. We report that the phylogenetically derived termite Nasutitermes sp. efficiently degrades lignin via substantial depletion of major...

Environmental factors control species distributions and abundances, but effectiveness of land use and disturbance variables for modeling species generally is unknown compared to climate, soil, and topography variables. Therefore, I used predictor variables from categories of 1) land use and disturbance, 2) climate, and 3) soil, topography, and wind speed to model the relative abundances (i.e., percentage of all trees) of 65 common tree species in the eastern United States, with a contrast to presence-absence models of species distributions. First, I modeled variables within each category...

Land area in urban use may be growing faster than population growth, increasing urban sprawl. With calibrated population density thresholds from the Worldpop population model, area and densities can be measured for suburban and urban density classes (≥ 250 humans per square kilometer) at global and national scales and both broad multi-city agglomerations and fine city cores during 2000 to 2020. Globally, net expansion of suburban and urban, urban, and high-density urban area was 930,000, 545,000, and 215,000 km2, respectively, with 25% to 35% of expansion located in India. Area containing...

Background: One issue in invasive plant ecology is identification of the factors related to the invasion process that increase number of non-native species. When invasion by non-native species increases, so does the probability that some non-native species will become harmful, or classified as invasive species, which disrupt natural ecosystems with attendant economic and social costs. I quantified patterns of how non-native species richness varied with vegetation types and human populations. To evaluate the relative importance of different predictor variables for invasion pathways in the...

Pollen reconstructions of tree genera in North America since glaciation are available, but species distributions predicted for paleoclimate based on tree inventories may inform knowledge gaps. Here I examined the distributions of 25 species or species groups from 20 000 years ago (ka) to 5 ka to give potential paleoecological ranges of boreal and temperate tree species. I also assessed the effects of correlated climate variables on species distribution models for current and past climate, which were modeled with the non‐linear random forests classifier. Climate change alone was enough to...

Forest disturbances have significant effects on water quality and quantity, river geomorphology, and the ecology of receiving waterbodies. Riparian forests provide numerous functions for aquatic communities including retaining fine sediments and nutrients, controlling water temperature, and providing food sources and habitat for aquatic organisms. Forestry Best Management Practices (BMPs) use riparian forests as buffers to mitigate potential sources of disturbance to aquatic ecosystems from forest management. The objective of this study was to quantify the impacts of timber harvest on...

In the Willamette River, OR, main channel temperatures can be too warm for cold water fishes, causing fish to concentrate in secondary channel features that provide thermal refugia. However, temperature regimes vary among and within features. Improved understanding of physical processes controlling thermal regimes is needed. This study developed a dimensionless index for assessment of thermal refugia on the upper Willamette River. The novel hyporheic insolation (HIN) index uses minimal field measurements to predict thermal refugia resulting from buffering. Continuous water temperature...

When people think about paper production in Wisconsin, they normally think about one of our large pulp and paper mills. Pulp and paper mills use vast quantities of pulpwood from Wisconsin’s forests to produce a variety of bulk paper products. Without a doubt, these mills play a crucial role in managing our forests by providing markets for pulpwood from our forests and chip residues from Wisconsin sawmills.