Treesearch

While there is a large literature on how individual homeowners perceive location-specific wildfire hazard, there is only one study specific to U.S. family forest owners. Using respondents from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service's National Woodland Owner Survey of family forest ownerships in the United States, we investigate the relationship between landowners' wildfire concerns and biophysical wildfire hazard across the contiguous United States. As a measure of long-term conditions for high intensity wildfire, we use the USDA Forest Service's Wildfire Hazard...

At its heart, forest management is grounded in valuation, with questions regarding what, how, and how much individuals value the forest being fundamental for efficient management. In this paper, we try to understand why private family forest owners value their forestland, and how owner and forest characteristics vary depending on the type of value. We estimate the demographic and socio-economic factors behind a suite of stated reasons for owning forest, from traditional marketvalue reasons to less-traditional, non-market reasons, among others. For our analysis, we use the United States...

We assessed the net impacts of a wood-dependent pellet industry of global importance on contemporaneous local forest carbon component pools (live trees, standing-dead trees, soils) and total stocks. We conducted post-matched difference-in-differences analyses of forest inventory data between 2000 and 2019 to infer industrial concurrent and lagged effects in the US coastal southeast. Results point to contemporaneous carbon neutrality. We found net incremental effects on carbon pools within live trees, and no net effects on standing-dead tree nor soil pools. However, we found concurrent...

To properly parameterize physics-based models of wildland fire behavior, it is necessary to understand the magnitude of convective heat transfer in various scenarios. In order to do so, we isolated the con- vective heating process in an idealized wildland fuel: pine needle litter layers. A heated wind tunnel was used to obtain a Reynolds number dependent correlation for the Nusselt number for: (1) a sin- gle representative fuel element, and (2) the bulk porous medium - both exposed to sudden pulses of high temperature air. The former was obtained through resistive thermometry and the...

Efforts to develop American chestnuts [Castanea dentata, (Marsh.) Borkh], with improved resistance to the chestnut blight fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica (Murr.) Barr, and Phytophthora root rot, caused by Phythophthora cinnamomi Rands, are ongoing. Establishing founder populations of improved chestnut will require understanding the ecological and silvicultural requirements of the species. In areas where white tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus Zimmerman) hinder tree regeneration success, understanding how browsing will affect the establishment of planted chestnut is critical. We evaluated...

Urbanization is one of the most widespread and extreme examples of habitat alteration. As humans dominate landscapes, they introduce novel elements into environments, including artificial light, noise pollution, and anthropogenic food sources. One understudied form of anthropogenic food is refuse from restaurants, which can alter wildlife populations and, in turn, entire wildlife communities by providing a novel and stable food source. Using data from the Maricopa Association of Governments and the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project, we investigated...

There is increasing momentum to implement conservation and management approaches that adapt forests to climate change so as to sustain ecosystem functions. These range from actions designed to increase the resistance of current composition and structure to negative impacts to those designed to transition forests to substantially different characteristics. A component of many adaptation approaches will likely include assisted migration of future climate-adapted tree species or genotypes. While forest-assisted migration (FAM) has been discussed conceptually and examined experimentally for...

Uncertainty and emerging threats associated with climate change necessitate the development of new approaches for managing forest ecosystems. To address this need the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) Network was established to examine the efficacy of three climate adaptation strategies in important forest types across North America: 1) resistance to change by increasing overstory tree health through reduced inter-tree competition, 2) resilience by creating conditions that allow change within the natural range of variability while encouraging greater abundance of native...

Black ash (Fraxinus nigra Marsh.) forests of north-central North America are currently threatened by the non-native emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis, EAB). Despite the wide distribution of F. nigra ecosystems, and the concern over EAB impact, little is known about their structure and natural stand dynamics. We sampled six old-growth F. nigra stands to assess structure, composition, tree recruitment, and past disturbance. Dendrochronological results revealed that disturbance rates fluctuated markedly over the past 200 years or more, but remained relatively low, suggesting small- to...

Combined heat and moisture transfer modeling is used in building envelope analysis to identify potential moisture durability risks. Moisture transfer in porous materials is typically partitioned into liquid transport and vapor diffusion. Although modeling approaches differ in complexity, coefficients for liquid transport are often derived from laboratory measurements of water absorption by partial immersion. Models generally include the assumption that capillary transport is dominant during the measurement, while vapor diffusion is negligible. This is reasonable for mineral-based materials,...