Treesearch

In October, month-over-month data declined in the majority of categories. Year-over-year data remain positive in most categories. Single-family permits and starts decreased again, month-over-month and year-over-year. Increasing borrowing costs, slow income growth, and elevated house prices have resulted in a major obstacle for new and existing house sales. October was the ninth consecutive monthly decrease for existing house sales. Single-family construction spending decreased for the sixth straight month.

Extreme weather events, such as ice storms, are increasing and have potentially large impacts on forests, including belowground structures such as fine roots and mycorrhizal fungi. Many forest trees rely on the mutualistic relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and plants; a relationship that, when disrupted, can negatively impact tree net primary productivity. We took advantage of a large-scale ice storm manipulation in the northeastern United States to test the hypothesis that increasing ice storm intensity and frequency would reduce ectomycorrhizal fungal root tips per unit root length...

Multiple aspects of forest land management present research partnership opportunities for the USDA Forest Service and tribal nations. These aspects include forests, fuels, and ecocultural resources that often are appropriate to manage at the landscape scale. The impacts of global climate change heighten the timeliness and need for partnerships. Practices that are appropriate for Forest Service-tribal partnerships generally have not been documented in a designated publication. This report responds to this technical knowledge need by presenting field-based insights about effective practices...

As the future climate becomes hotter or drier, forests may be exposed to morefrequent or severe droughts. To inform efforts to ensure resilient forests, it is critical to know which forests may be most exposed to future drought andwhere. Longer duration droughts lasting 2–3 years or more are especiallyimportant to quantify because forests are likely to experience impacts. We summarized exposure to 36-month drought for forests across the conterminous United States using the Standardized Precipitation-EvapotranspirationIndex (SPEI) overlaid on forest inventory plot locations. Exposure was...

The global pandemic, due to SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), disrupted global commodity markets and individual consumption patterns. Various COVID-19-related policies were put in place by state and local governments to limit the virus outbreak, which disrupted the production and supply chains of manufacturing industries. The forest sector was not an exception. Using the Time Regression Discontinuity (T-RD) approach, we quantified the effect of various COVID-19 policies on standing timber prices in the Southern United States. We found an overall significant decrease in prices across all timber...

Biomass estimates for shrub-dominated ecosystems in southern California have been generated at national and statewide extents. However, existing data tend to underestimate biomass in shrub vegetation types are limited to one point in time, or estimate aboveground live biomass only. In this study, we extended our previously developed estimates of aboveground live biomass (AGLBM) based on the empirical relationship of plot-based field biomass measurements to Landsat normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and multiple environmental factors to include other vegetative pools of biomass....

The increase in the frequency and severity of water crises around the world necessitates maintaining or augmenting investments in the hydrologic sciences, including in a trained, diverse workforce. The USDA Forest Service operates a network of 85 Experimental Forests and Ranges, Experimental Watersheds, and cooperating sites (EFRs), 31 of which include long-term hydrologic studies (HydroEFRs). The HydroEFRs are centers for hydrologic science and education and play a key role informing watershed policy and management. The goals of this study were to understand (1) how, broadly, the women...

Objective. "Nature prescriptions" are increasingly being adopted by health sectors as an adjunct to standard care to attend to health and social needs. We investigated levels of need and interest in nature prescriptions in adults with cardiovascular diseases, psychological distress and concomitants (e.g. physical inactivity, sedentary behaviour, obesity, loneliness, burn-out). Methods. A nationally-representative survey of 3,319 adults across all states and territories of Australia was completed in February 2021 (response 84.0%). Participants were classified across 15 target groups using...

The establishment of monoculture plantations of non-native tree species is a common practice for supplementing native timber stocks. Since native wildlife species may lack co-evolved traits needed to successfully exploit nonnative tree species, non-native plantations are expected to provide inferior habitat for native biodiversity. However, some studies report that plantations may increase net biodiversity at the landscape scale by introducing novel habitats or supplementing existing natural forests. We used point counts to sample birds in 2016 and 2017 in mature Norway spruce (Picea...

Avian species provide pest control services in some agricultural systems, which may incentivize farmers to conserve natural habitats for native biodiversity. A critical component of this equation, however, is verifying that avian species are consuming potential pest species in the agricultural ecosystems. We used a DNA metabarcoding approach to determine the frequency of pest presence in songbird fecal samples collected from birds caught on diversified, low-intensity farms in New England, USA, during the bird breeding season. Twelve species of insect pest were identified in fecal samples,...