Treesearch

This summary report provides an overview of findings from the fourth annualized inventory of Iowa forests based on data collected from 2012 to 2018. Forest land area remained stable at 2.9 million acres, and 69 percent of forest land is in the oak/hickory forest-type group. Forests in the State continue to mature, with 72 percent in large diameter stands and 50 percent in stands older than 60 years of age. Total live-tree net volume on timberland is 4.4 billion cubic feet, and 69 percent of that volume is in growing-stock trees. Decreases in gross growth (7 percent) and mortality (2...

Background: Historically, wildfire regimes produced important landscape-scale disturbances in many regions globally. The “pyrodiversity begets biodiversity” hypothesis suggests that wildfires that generate temporally and spatially heterogeneous mosaics of wildfire severity and post-burn recovery enhance biodiversity at landscape scales. However, river management has often led to channel incision that disconnects rivers from their floodplains, desiccating floodplain habitats and depleting groundwater. In conjunction with predicted increases in frequency, intensity and extent of wildfires...

Many women and women-run associations were involved in historical urban beautification in the United States, especially tree planting, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While men had formal roles as city foresters, arborists, horticulturalists, and landscape architects, women from elite families sometimes labored for free to organize and advocate for urban tree planting. Tightly knit social circles of high-society women in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, yielded much greater influence in nascent tree planting and park creation movements than has generally been recognized. They often...

Forest management is often practiced to enhance conditions for wildlife, including native bees. Evaluations of the effects of forest management on bees have shown that abundance and diversity are higher in newly created earlysuccessional conditions. To date, studies have restricted sampling to the forest understory; however, recent research finds that bee abundance is as high or higher in forest canopies than in understories, suggesting that previous observations of substantially greater bee abundance and diversity in recently managed areas could be an artifact of incomplete sampling of...

Methods used to assign rarity among species are fundamental to our ecological understanding and conservation of species that are most vulnerable to extinction or extirpation. Bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila) are at the forefront of declines in pollinator diversity and a comprehensive understanding of their conservation requirements in any landscape is essential. Rarity is generally defined in terms of numerical abundance and geographical distribution, though aspects of species life history, such as degree of specialization and taxonomic relatedness, are also widely recognized as...

1. The ecology of the canopy–aerosphere interface within forested ecosystems remains underexplored largely due to the challenges of physically accessing this zone. Sky bridges, towers and other permanent structures are most commonly used to sample the forest canopy–aerosphere interface, but these methods are costly, challenging to replicate, and often alter and degrade the local environment during construction. Thus, there is a clear need for cost-effective and replicable methods for accessing and passively sampling above the forest canopy. 2. We designed and deployed an inexpensive and...

Longleaf pine forests are economically and culturally valued ecosystems in the southeastern United States. Efforts to restore the longleaf pine ecosystem have risen dramatically over the past three decades. Longleaf pine restoration generally involves varying degrees of forest harvesting and frequent applications of prescribed fire. Thus, it is important to understand their interactions with the atmosphere on a large scale. In this study, we analyzed 14 parameters of aerosols, gasses, and energy from three areas with longleaf pine restoration (named Bladen in eastern NC, Escambia in...

A lack of regional and international collective action is the greatest barrier to achieving global environmental sustainability. Game theoretic experiments suggest that introducing shared goals could offer a path forward.

Water table depth and vegetation are key controls of methane (CH4) emissions from peatlands. Microtopography integrates these factors into features called microforms. Microforms often differ in CH4 emissions, but microform-dependent patterns of belowground CH4 cycling remain less clearly resolved. To investigate the impact of microtopography on belowground CH4 cycling, we characterized depth profiles of the community composition and activity of CH4-cycling microbes using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing, incubations, and measurements of porewater CH4 concentration and isotopic composition from...

This article is composed of three independent commentaries about the state of Integrated, Coordinated, Open, Networked (ICON) principles in the American Geophysical Union Biogeosciences section, and discussion on the opportunities and challenges of adopting them. Each commentary focuses on a different topic: (a) Global collaboration, technology transfer, and application (Section 2), (b) Community engagement, community science, education, and stakeholder involvement (Section 3), and (c) Field, experimental, remote sensing, and real-time data research and application (Section 4). We discuss...