Treesearch

Soy flour dispersions are used as adhesives for bonding interior wood laminates, but the high viscosity of these dispersions requires low solids in the adhesive formulations; the greater water content causes excessive steam pressure during hot press manufacturing. This limits the utility of soy adhesives in replacing urea–formaldehyde adhesives; thus, understanding the cause of high soy viscosities is important. Lack of literature on aqueous soy flour dispersion rheology led to our dynamic rheology studies of these dispersions to understand high viscosity and the effect of various additives...

Streptanthus squamiformis Goodman (Brassicaceae) is a plant narrowly endemic to the Athens Plateau; Central Hills, Ridges, and Valleys; and Central Mountain Ranges ecoregions of the Ouachita Mountains, and previously known from five adjacent counties in western Arkansas and southeastern Oklahoma. We document a 100-km range extension of this species to Perry County in central Arkansas, its first occurrence in the Fourche Mountains Ecoregion.

Climate change projections provided by global climate models (GCM) are generally too coarse for local and regional applications. Local and regional climate change impact studies therefore use downscaled datasets. While there are studies that evaluate downscaling methodologies, there is no study comparing the downscaled datasets that are actually distributed and used in climate change impact studies, and there is no guidance for selecting a published downscaled dataset. We compare five widely used statistically downscaled climate change projection datasets that cover the conterminous USA...

Acute and extreme weather events can cause considerable damage to the tissues of trees, including stem death and branch or leaf distortion, which may limit their survival and reproduction. In January 2016, a rare cold spell impacted the coastal forests of subtropical China. Using post-hoc assessments, we evaluated the morphological and physiological response of Chinese tallow (Triadica sebifera L.) to the extreme cold spell in two distinct ecoregions, one (Xiangshan, China) representing the cold spell impacted zone and the other (Taizhou, China) representing the non-affected zone. To...

Aim: Biological invasions are a major threat to biodiversity in aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Insects represent an important group of species in freshwater and terrestrial habitats, and they constitute a large proportion of non-native species. However, while many non-native insects are known from terrestrial ecosystems, they appear to be less represented in freshwater habitats. Comparisons between freshwater and terrestrial habitats of invader richness relative to native species richness are scarce, which hinders syntheses of invasion processes. Here, we used data from three regions on...

A wide variety of mathematical models exist which attempt to assess the risk of mold growth in building envelopes. Model predictions often fail to adequately represent observations from field experiments. We examine ways in which one model, the mold resistance design (MRD) model, can be improved to better align with empirical data. A database of laboratory mold growth results was assembled from the literature, which included not only the European spruce and pine on which pioneering models were based, but also materials commonly used in North America, such as oriented strand board (OSB) and...

In seed-obligate conifer forests of the western US, land managers need a better understanding of the spatiotemporal variability in post-fire recovery to develop adaptation strategies. Successful establishment of post-fire seedlings requires the arrival of seeds and favorable environmental conditions for germination, survival, and growth. We investigated the spatiotemporal limitations to post-fire seedling establishment and height growth in dry to moist mixed conifer forests with and without post-fire forest management treatments (salvage logging, grass seeding) in areas burned from low to...

Quantifying above-ground biomass changes, DAGB, is key for understanding carbon dynamics. National Forest Inventories, NFIs, aims at providing precise estimates of DAGB relying on model-assisted estimators that incorporate auxiliary information to reduce uncertainty. Poststratification estimators, PS, are commonly used for this task. Recently proposed endogenous poststratification, EPS, methods have the potential to improve the precision of PS estimates of DAGB. Using the state of Oregon, USA, as a testing area, we developed a formal comparison between three EPS methods, traditional PS...

The Miombo woodland is the most extensive tropical woodland in south-central Africa. However, field sample plot data on forest cover changes, species distribution and carbon stocks in the Miombo ecoregion are inadequate for effective forest management. Owing to logistical challenges that come with field-based inventory methods, remote sensing plays an important role in supplementing field methods to fill in data gaps. Traditional satellite and manned aircraft remote sensing platforms have their own advantages and limitations. The advent of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) has made it...

Lignin is a by-product of biorefineries and pulp and paper manufacturers. Lignin is a renewable source of phenolic precursors for fuels and chemicals. Hydrogenolysis of lignin cleaves the abundant β-O-4 bonds and releases phenolics. However, selective hydrogenolysis of lignin’s β-O-4 bonds is challenging because it requires high-pressure H2. Here we show efficient hydrogenolysis of lignin model compounds and technical lignin by Ru/C catalyst and internal hydrogen. The aliphatic hydroxyl groups (Cα OH) in lignin enabled Ru-catalyzed dehydrogenation of internal hydrogen and the formation of...