Treesearch

We incubated 196 large-diameter aspen (Populus tremuloides), birch (Betula papyrifera), and pine (Pinus taeda) logs on the FACE Wood Decomposition Experiment encompassing eight climatically-distinct forest sites in the United States. We sampled dead wood from these large-diameter logs after 2 to 6 y of decomposition and determined wood rot type as a continuous variable using the lignin loss/density loss ratio (L/D) and assessed wood-rotting fungal guilds using high-throughput amplicon sequencing (HTAS) of the ITS-2 marker. We found L/ D values in line with a white rot dominance in all...

The role of regional species diversity in large-scale species ii,vasions h::s bee,, lai-gely controversial. Onthe c,ne hand, it has been proposed thrlt diversity may facilitate invasion ' "diversity begets diversity")because regions with hi~her di •.'ersity may indicate favorable conditions for many more species. On theother hand, high diversity may indicate high levels of niche occupation, thus making it more difficult fornew species to invade. In the )ast, invasion biologists have evaluated how regional native and exoticrichness are related. Here, we test whether the range si,e of exotic...

Numerous wetland depressions occur across the U.S. Atlantic Coastal Plain, a region of complex physiography spanning a landward-to-seaward elevation gradient. Coastal Plain depressional wetlands are noted for supporting a diversity of plant communities that provide important faunal habitats. Because these "isolated" wetlands are vulnerable to degradation and loss on private lands, protected and managed public lands have become important refugia for their conservation. A practical system of vegetation types and vegetation-dynamics models can aid in developing management or restoration...

Climate change, the rising air temperature and changes in the intensity and frequency of rainfall, and sea level rise (SLR), represents one of the most important threats to coastal wetlands that have numerous ecosystem services from erosion and water quality control to wildlife habitat. Climate change-induced disturbances affect the sustainability of coastal wetland ecosystems mainly through altering their hydrologic functions. However, how to assess wetland hydrological resilience, the ability of wetland hydrology to recover from climate disturbances remain challenging. This chapter first...

Prescribed burns and understory thinnings are forest management practices aimed at reducing fuel loads tolessen wildfire threat in the Southern Appalachians, USA. Spiders play a critical role in forest ecosystems bycontrolling insect populations and providing an important food source for vertebrates. We used pitfall andcolored pan traps to investigate how abundance, species richness, and diversity of spiders differed among threefuel reduction treatments administered repeatedly over a 15-year period and untreated controls. Additionally, weexamined how spiders responded to one round (before...

Context The southeastern U.S. experiences tornadoes and severe thunderstorms that can economic and ecological damages to forest stands resulting in loss of timber, reduction in short-term carbon sequestration, and increased susceptibility to forest pests and pathogens. Objectives This project sought to determine landscape-scale patterns of recurring wind damages and their relationships to topographic attributes, overall climatic patterns and soil characteristics in southeastern forests. Methods We assembled post-damage assessment data collected since 2012 by the National Oceanic and...

This chapter reviews the national forest inventories (NFIs) done in Puerto Rico (PR) and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) by discussing the periodic forest inventories of mainland PR (1980-1990) along with the annualized Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program inventories of PR and the USVI (2001-present). Information is offered about the terms and definitions used, current sampling design, processing of data to estimate land area, the equations used for predicting total stem volume and above- and below-ground biomass, results of the most recent forest inventories, data quality control...

This chapter discusses the challenges and opportunities of National Forest Inventories (NFIs) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), analyzing aspects related to the influence of the institutional framework and different sampling designs, the challenges in providing estimates that can be compared internationally, and the need to improve the transparency and transfer of information.

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the future prospects for National Forest Inventories (NFIs) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC): the continuous monitoring of forests, the analysis of the main methodological similarities, differences and challenges presented by the countries of the region on the subject. It is considered important to know the trends and plans that NFI officials have for their future development, as well as the concrete actions that can be employed to resolve the challenges they face.The results and conclusions presented in this chapter are drawn both from...

Tropical forest understory regeneration occurs rapidly after disturbance with compositional trajectories that depend on species availability and environmental conditions. To predict future tropical forest regeneration dynamics, we need a deeper understanding of how pulse disturbance events, like hurricanes, interact with environmental variability to affect understory demography and composition. We examined fern and sapling mortality, recruitment, and community composition in relation to solar radiation and soil moisture using 17 years of forest dynamics data (2003–2019) from the Canopy...