Treesearch

The recent decade has witnessed an increase in irrigated acreage in the southeast United States due to the shift in cropping patterns, climatic conditions, and water availability. Peanut, a major legume crop cultivated in Georgia, Southeast United States, has been a staple food in the American household. Regardless of its significant contribution to the global production of peanuts (fourth largest), studies related to local or regional scale water consumption in peanut productionand its significant environmental impacts are scarce. Therefore, the present research contributes to the water...

Evolutionary theory predicts that the process of range expansion will lead to differences in life-history and dispersal traits between the core and edge of a population. At the edge, selection and genetic drift can have opposing effects on reproductive ability, while spatial sorting by dispersal ability can increase dispersal. However, the context that individuals experience, including population density and mating status, also impacts dispersal behavior. We seek to understand the shifts in traits of populations expanding across natural, heterogenous environments, and the evolutionary and...

Industrialized sites are hotspots for nonnative species because of continuous anthropogenic disturbance and nonnative propagule rain resulting from hitchhikers exchanged through global trade. Investigating plant traits and the phylogenetic structure of species at initial ports of entry can contribute to our understanding of how species are introduced to, assembled into, and survive at industrialized sites, which can also inform how susceptible these sites are to nonnative plant invasions. To compare native and nonnative species, we asked three questions: 1) Are plant traits differentially...

Many invasive grasses drastically transform the ecosystems they invade, putting native communities across the globe at risk (Fusco et al., 2019). Climate change will likely increase invasion risks for many regions as climates in temperate zones become warmer (Bellard et al., 2012) and tropical and semi-tropical species are able to expand their distributions. However, other axes of environmental variation could delay invasions. For example, invaders from low-latitude-adapted source populations may not flower at higher latitudes because of differences in photoperiod sensitivity (Brandes,...

The excessive application of nitrogen in cucumber cultivation may lead to nitrate accumulation in fruits with potential toxicity to humans. Harvested fruits of agricultural crops should be evaluated for residual nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) nutrient levels. This is necessary to avoid nutrient toxicity from the consumption of fresh produce with excessive nutrient levels. Electronic noses are instruments well-suited for the nondestructive detection of fruit and vegetable quality based on volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions. This proof-of-concept study wasdesigned to test...

A major problem associated with the development of medicinal plant products is the lack of quick, easy, and inexpensive methods to assess and monitor product quality. Essential oils are natural plant-derived volatile substances used worldwide for numerous applications. The important uses of these valuable products often induce producers to create fraudulent or lower quality products. As a result, consumers place a high value on authentic and certified products. Mint is valued for essential oil used in the food, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and health industries. This study investigatedthe use...

Data on wildfire growth are useful for multiple research purposes but are frequently unavailable and often have data quality problems. For these reasons, we developed a protocol for collecting daily burned area time series from the InciWeb website, Incident Management Situation Reports (IMSRs), and other sources. We apply this protocol to create the Warehouse of Multiple Burned Area Time Series (WoMBATS) data, which are a collection of burned area time series with cross-check data for 514 wildfires in the United States for the years 2018–2020. We compare WoMBATS derived distributions of...

Current forest monitoring technologies including satellite remote sensing, manned/piloted aircraft, and observation towers leave uncertainties about a wildfire's extent, behavior, and conditions in the fire's near environment, particularly during its early growth. Rapid mapping and real-time fire monitoring can inform in-time intervention or management solutions to maximize beneficial fire outcomes. Drone systems' unique features of 3D mobility, low flight altitude, and fast and easy deployment make them a valuable tool for early detection and assessment of wildland fires, especially in...

Modern forest management generally relies on thinning treatments to reduce fuels and mitigate the threat of catastrophic wildfire. They have also been proposed as a tool to augment downstream flows by reducing evapotranspiration. Warming climates are causing many forests to transition from snow-dominated to rain-dominated precipitation regimes—in which water stores are depleted earlier in the summer. However, there are relatively few studies of these systems that directly measure the hydrologic impacts of such treatments during and following snow-free winters. This work compares the...