Treesearch

Long-term forest monitoring is vital to understand how Hawaiian forests change over time and to manage and conserve natural resources. Forest inventories are assessed about every 10 years in Hawaiʻi by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program, in collaboration with state and federal partners. This report summarizes key findings from 246 forested plots in Hawai‘i, inventoried from 2010 to 2015. Estimates were provided for forest area, tree species composition, size distribution, volume, biomass, carbon, understory vegetation, damage to...

Chippewa National Forest staff are working with the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, the Leech Lake Tribal College, and the University of Minnesota to research and understand the historic use of fire in regional land management. By analyzing tree rings from a culturally significant island and sharing related knowledge, the partnership is deepening their understanding of the land, strengthening relationships, and laying the groundwork for further collaboration. Using this knowledge to inform present day land management may help ensure the region's mixed pine woodlands are resilient into the future.

In July, month-over-month data continued a negative movement in the majority of data categories. Year-over-year data were better; however, single-family permits decreased again. Again, this portends further moderation in single-family activity in the forthcoming months. July also was the sixth consecutive monthly decrease for existing house sales.

Around the world, factors such as invasive species, climate change, and increasingly variable weather have raised the importance of tree monitoring, stewardship, and planning, especially in urban areas. In the United States, USDA Forest Service scientists have collaborated with a variety of partners to develop a range of new resources to improve the health, monitoring, and stewardship of the urban forest. In the past few years, these new resources have included two field guides, five videos, more than 1,000 training sessions, and a mobile app.

Climate and vegetation phenology are closely linked, and climate change is already impacting phenology in many systems. These impacts are expected to progress in the future. We sought to forecast future shifts in rangeland growing season timing due to climate change, and interpret their importance for land management and ecosystem function. We trained a model on remotely sensed land surface phenology and climate data collected from 2001 to 2014 in temperate United States rangelands. We used this model to forecast annual growing season start dates, end dates, and season length through 2099...

The management and conservation of inland waters involves working with diverse groups of people and partners across a wide array of fisheries and aquatic resources. Here, we extracted historical authorship information (2006–2020) from published articles in 18 fish-related international journals to understand the productivity and impact of women investigators relative to men. There was a great variability in both the participation of women as lead authors and number of citations across journals. However, we found that 30% of the articles were led by women, which is relatively proportional...

Wildlife monitoring programs designed to inform forest management and conservation decisions in the face of climate change benefit from longterm datasets with consistent methodology. Nevertheless, many monitoring programs may seek to transition to alternative methods because emerging technologies can improve trend tracking and expand the number of target populations, increase spatial scale, and reduce long-term costs. Integrated models strengthen the capacity to adapt long-term monitoring programs to next generation methods. Here we present a case study of northern spotted owl (Strix...

Predator-prey interactions shape ecosystem stability and are influenced by changes in ecosystem productivity. However, because multiple biotic and abiotic drivers shape the trophic responses of predators to productivity, we often observe patterns, but not mechanisms, by which productivity drives food web structure. One way to capture mechanisms shaping trophic responses is to quantify trophic interactions among multiple trophic groups and by using complementary metrics of trophic ecology. In this study, we combine two diet-tracing methods: diet DNA and stable isotopes, for two trophic...

Wood duck females often nest in tree cavities located in large-diameter deciduous trees. Temporal changes in forest age and composition during recent decades may have influenced the abundance of stems with suitable nesting cavities in the forested portion of Northern MN, United States. Thus, we ascertained whether temporal changes in the abundance of such stems occurred in this area during six Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) evaluation cycles (i.e., 1977 to 2015–2019). We used FIA data and independently estimated proportions of stems with suitable cavities in different tree-species,...

Ecological communities are being impacted by global change worldwide. Experiments are a powerful tool to understand how global change will impact communities by comparing control and treatment replicates. Communities consist of multiple species, and their associated abundances make multivariate methods an effective approach to study community compositional differences between control and treated replicates. Dissimilarity metrics are a commonly employed multivariate measure of compositional differences; however, while highly informative, dissimilarity metrics do not elucidate the specific...