Treesearch

Groundwater systems in snow-dominated drainage areas supply cool baseflows that support instream and downstream users late into the dry season. Yet, these catchments are becoming rarer with climate change and anthropogenic pressures that threaten groundwater systems. Restoration of low-gradient meadows and streams can recover a catchment’s natural storage potential, especially in Mediterranean biomes such as the Sierra Nevada of California where summer groundwater recharge is scarce. The degradation of meadows due to intense human modification has decreased groundwater elevations and...

Acetylation is a type of commercial wood modification used to enhance the durability of wood. Despite its adoption, especially in outdoor environments, there are mixed data on how acetylation affects the combustion of wood. This paper evaluates the differences in acetylated and untreated wood using a cone calorimeter in combination with Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) to look for acetic acid vapors in the combustion gases. Two thicknesses of acetylated pine boards were tested and compared against an untreated board from the same genus. No differences were observed between...

Mycelium-bonded bio-composites are an emerging class of novel materials developed over the past ten years. These have attracted significant research and commercialization interest with a steadily increasing number of papers, patents, and products. The basic idea behind these novel composites is to use fungal mycelia to bond substrates, mostly lignocellulosic biomass, together. Therefore, fungal mycelia in the system actually work as adhesives. This kind of adhesive is different from traditionally recognized resin-based adhesives in characteristics, processing, application field, and...

Identifying locations prone to exporting nitrogen (N), also called export control points, within residential landscapes, is key to determining N mitigation strategies. Within residential landscapes, lawns have the potential to act as either a sink of N via uptake and denitrification, or a source of N via additions such as fertilizer. Lawns draining to impervious surfaces are more likely to be sources of N loading to receiving water bodies through directly connected curb and sewer flow paths. We utilized small-scale rainfall experiments to examine whether hydrobiogeochemical measurements of...

In the past, the dry mixed conifer forests of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains experienced frequent low to mixed severity fires. However, due to fire suppression and past management, forest structure has changed, and the new fire regimes are characterized by large, high severity fires which kill a majority of the overstory trees. These new disturbance patterns require novel approaches to regenerate the forest as they are not adapted to large, high severity fires. We forecasted growth and fire behavior of young plantations for 100 years into the future using the Forest Vegetation...

Located in North Central Utah, Emigration Canyon is a prominent and historic canyon that runs northeast from Salt Lake City into the higher elevations of the Wasatch Mountains. The Wasatch Range is characterized by steep, rocky slopes and 26-44 millimeters of annual rainfall, both of which contribute to a high threat of wildfire. The area’s landscape is diverse with oak woodland at the lower elevations up to a conifer forest type including ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, and subalpine fir. The Utah Wildfire Risk Assessment Portal (UWRAP) rates the fire danger in Emigration Canyon as “Extreme.”...

Despite the abundance of tree diversity in the natural world, and generally high tree species richness in urban areas, urban forests continue to be dominated by a limited number of species. As socio-ecological systems, urban forests are shaped by historical and current management efforts and decision-making across a wide range of human actors. Drawing on past research, we offer a conceptual framework for describing the complex interactions among tree producers and consumers as trees are selected, grown, specified, and planted in private and public urban areas. We illustrate how multiple...

The wildland-urban interface (WUI), where housing intermingles with wildland vegetation, is the fastest-growing land use type in the United States. Given the ecological and social benefits of forest ecosystems, there is a growing need to more fully understand how such development alters the landscape context and structure of these WUI forests. In a space-for-time analysis we utilized land cover data, forest inventory plots, and housing density data over time to examine differences in forest characteristics of the northern US across three WUI change classes: (a) forest that has been in WUI...

Thousands of insect species have been introduced outside of their native ranges, and some of them strongly impact ecosystems and human societies. Because a large fraction of insects feed on or are associated with plants, nonnative plants provide habitat and resources for invading insects, thereby facilitating their establishment. Furthermore, plant imports represent one of the main pathways for accidental nonnative insect introductions. Here, we tested the hypothesis that plant invasions precede and promote insect invasions. We found that geographical variation in current nonnative insect...

Background: Wildfire is a landscape disturbance important for stream ecosystems and the recruitment of large wood (LW; LW describes wood in streams) into streams, with post-fire management also playing a role. We used a stratified random sample of 4th-order watersheds that represent a range of pre-fire stand age and fire severity from unburned to entirely burned watersheds to 1) determine whether watershed stand age (pre-fire) or fire severity affected riparian overstory survival, riparian coarse wood (CW; CW describes wood in riparian areas), LW, or in-stream physical, chemical, and...