Treesearch

Remote sensing is widely used to detect forest disturbances (e.g., wildfires, harvest, or outbreaks of pathogens or insects) over spatiotemporal scales that are infeasible to capture with field surveys. To understand forest ecosystem dynamics and the ecological role of human and natural disturbances, researchers and managers would like to characterize spatiotemporal patterns of several types of disturbance. Recent advances include the development and testing of algorithms to automatically detect and attribute an array of disturbance types across large forest landscapes from remotely sensed...

The authors are a team of fire whirl researchers who have been actively studying whirls and large-scale wildland fires by directly observing them through fire-fighting efforts and applying theory, scale modeling, and numerical simulations in fire research. This multidisciplinary research-background team previously conducted scale model experiments to reconstruct hazardous large-scale fires in the laboratory, then conducted numerical simulations and developed fundamental theories to translate these findings into a basic understanding of combustion science and fluid dynamics. This article, a...

In the 2020 fire season, the fire management community developed and tested a wide range of new practices to meet challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic. To better understand the effectiveness of different innovations and which should be considered for more permanent use, we surveyed Interagency Hotshot Crew (IHC) superintendents in January 2021. We focused on identifying innovations that, regardless of COVID-19, the IHCs would want to keep and why, as well as those that proved problematic. The survey focused on paperwork, briefings, and fire camp and incident command post setup....

Now over twenty years into the 21st century, it is suggested that we are entering a new era of wilderness visitor use management (VUM). Yet, we lack a recent review of the literature assessing the latest research trends to advance wilderness VUM in a meaningful way. Accordingly, this research serves as both a review of the last twenty years of U.S. wilderness VUM research and a launching point into the next era. Our assessment adds to several previous benchmarks that demonstrate the progress of wilderness VUM research. This review evaluates trends in methodologies and themes of inquiry...

Wildfires are increasing in scale and impact on the landscape, altering large amounts of wildlife habitat and forest ecosystems. The reduction of fuels through forest management is considered a primary way to reduce the extent and severity of wildfires before they occur but may lead to a decrease in tree density prohibitive of some species’ habitat. Alternatively, management actions undertaken after a fire may speed the trajectory of burned areas back into quality habitat but may also impede this development if the wrong type of treatment is undertaken. Thus, information on how different...

Forest therapy is an emerging holistic health practice that uses multisensory immersive engagements in forest settings to achieve health and wellbeing outcomes. Many forest therapy engagements take place via slow walks along a trail to optimally experience the array of sensory phenomena afforded along the route, yet surprisingly few forest therapy studies to date have investigated the characteristics of forest sites and trails that give rise to healthful experiences. In this research, we employ a hybrid approach to understand the conditions and features that contribute to a good forest...

The physical structure of vegetation is thought to be closely related to ecosystem function, but little is known of its pertinence across geographic regions. Here, we used data from over three million trees in continental North America to evaluate structural diversity - the volumetric capacity and physical arrangement of biotic components in ecosystems - as a predictor of productivity. We show that structural diversity is a robust predictor of forest productivity and consistently outperforms the traditional measure - species diversity - across climate conditions in North America. Moreover,...

Precipitation is a key driver of primary production worldwide, but primary production does not always track year-to-year variation in precipitation linearly. Instead, plant responses to changes in precipitation may exhibit time lags, or legacies of past precipitation. Legacies can be driven by multiple mechanisms, including persistent changes in plant physiological and morphological traits and changes to the physical environment, such as plant access to soil water. We used three precipitation manipulation experiments in central Texas, USA to evaluate the magnitude, duration, and potential...

Forests of the Southern Appalachian Mountains were historically dominated by hardwood species within the family Fagaceae, e.g., American chestnut (Castanea dentata) and white oak (Quercus alba) among others. Due to numerous biotic and abiotic stressors, including pathogen pressure, populations of many Fagaceae have been greatly reduced, or functionally eliminated as is the case with American chestnut. This has led to reforestation efforts designed to increase American chestnut and white oak populations in this region, but success has been minimal. Since soil fungal communities are crucial...

The American chestnut (Castanea dentata) is imperiled due primarily to two diseases caused by nonnative pathogens, notably chestnut blight and Phytophthora root rot (PRR) caused by Cryphonectria parasiticaand Phytophthora cinnamomi, respectively. Field reintroduction trials are important to test trees bred for blight resistance under forest conditions to quantify survival and field performance in managed stands that represent future restoration sites. We planted 513 pedigreed bare-root (1–0) nursery seedlings into an even-aged regeneration harvest in the Blue Ridge Mountains of eastern...