Treesearch

Mountain ecosystems provide multiple ecosystem services and are “natural laboratories” to understandecosystem responses to global change. Because of the inaccessibility and the high cost of field surveys, remotesensing indices are the major and sometimes the only measures to monitor the vegetation growth dynamics inmountains. However, there are large discrepancies in those indices that should be quantified in mountainousregions. This case study in Nepal, a highly mountainous region, explores the consistency and inconsistency of sixwidely used remote sensing indices in monitoring vegetation...

Humans have lived from equator to poles for millennia but are now increasingly intruding into the wild spaces of other species and steadily extruding ourselves from our own wild spaces, with a profound impact on: our relationship with the natural world; survival of other species; pollution; climate change; etc. We have yet to grasp how these changes directly impact our own health. The primary focus of this paper is on the beneficial influence of proximity to the natural environment. We summarize the evidence for associations between exposure to green space and blue space and improvements...

Our urban systems and their underlying sub-systems are designed to deliver only a narrow set of human-centered services, with little or no accounting or understanding of how actions undercut the resilience of social-ecological-technological systems (SETS). Embracing a SETS resilience perspective creates opportunities for novel approaches to adaptation and transformation in complex environments. We: i) frame urban systems through a perspective shift from control to entanglement, ii) position SETS thinking as novel sensemaking to create repertoires of responses commensurate with environmental...

Yellow pan traps are frequently used to monitor establishment of hymenopteran parasitoids introduced for biological control of the invasive ash pest, emerald ash borer (EAB), Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire (Coleoptera: Buprestidae). To evaluate and improve their efficacy as a monitoring tool, we conducted field studies during 2016–2019 in southern Michigan where the introduced hymenopteran larval parasitoids, Tetrastichus planipennisi Yang (Eulophidae) and Spathius galinae (Braconidae) Belokobylskij & Strazanac are established. Our objectives were to describe parasitoid seasonal abundance,...

Aim: Many invasive plant species benefit from enemy release resulting from the absence of insect herbivores in their invaded range. However, over time, specialized herbivores may 'catch up' with such invasive plants. Black locust is a tree species with a relatively limited native range in North America but has invaded large areas in virtually every temperate continent including North America. We hypothesize that both intra-and intercontinental spread of black locust leads to a parallel, though delayed pattern of intra-and intercontinental spread of insect herbivores. Location: Global....

Background and Aims: In dryland ecosystems, conifer species are threatened by more frequent and severe droughts, which can push species beyond their physiological limits. Adequate seedling establishment will be critical for future resilience to global change. We used a common garden glasshouse experiment to determine how seedling functional trait expression and plasticity varied among seed sources in response to a gradient of water availability, focusing on a foundational dryland tree species of the western USA, Pinus monophylla. We hypothesized that the expression of growth-related...

In 2019, approximately 103 participants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (Forest Service), NASA (including representatives from SMAP, NISAR , ICESat-2 , GEDI , CMS ), and other federal, private and academic entities attended the USFS-NASA Joint Applications Workshop. The objective of this workshop was to increase awareness and understanding of the capabilities of NASA data products, as well as to develop connections and strengthen partnerships between NASA and the Forest Service. In this vein the workshop sought to identify opportunities for collaboration between the...

This guide builds on existing frameworks to link ecological and socio-economic vulnerability. Vulnerability assessments use spatially explicit ecological and economic data to describe the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of forest resources and local communities to potential hazards. This work describes ways to measure each aspect of vulnerability and ways to aggregate data that makes for more straightforward analysis. Knowledge about the relative vulnerability of natural resources and the communities that depend on them can help prioritize and inform management and guide...

Anecdotal evidence and some previous studies suggest that as development approaches private forest land, there’s a decline in commercial timber management of those forests. At the request of Gary Lettman, then a principal forest economist with the Oregon Department of Forestry, Jeff Kline and Andrew Gray, researchers with the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, studied whether this held true in Oregon and Washington. They used data from the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory Analysis program and state data from 2001–2016 to determine if there was a connection. Kline...

Many species’ distributions are shifting in response to climate change. Many distributional shifts are predictably poleward or higher in elevation, but heterogeneity in the rate and direction of shifts both within and between species appears to be common. We found high heterogeneity in the trajectory of winter range shifts for 65 species of birds across eastern North America and in the different traits and trait interactions associated with these shifts across the spatial scales we examined. We used data from the Christmas Bird Count to quantify the trajectory of winter latitudinal center...