Treesearch

Context The southeastern U.S. experiences tornadoes and severe thunderstorms that can economic and ecological damages to forest stands resulting in loss of timber, reduction in short-term carbon sequestration, and increased susceptibility to forest pests and pathogens. Objectives This project sought to determine landscape-scale patterns of recurring wind damages and their relationships to topographic attributes, overall climatic patterns and soil characteristics in southeastern forests. Methods We assembled post-damage assessment data collected since 2012 by the National Oceanic and...

This chapter discusses the challenges and opportunities of National Forest Inventories (NFIs) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), analyzing aspects related to the influence of the institutional framework and different sampling designs, the challenges in providing estimates that can be compared internationally, and the need to improve the transparency and transfer of information.

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the future prospects for National Forest Inventories (NFIs) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC): the continuous monitoring of forests, the analysis of the main methodological similarities, differences and challenges presented by the countries of the region on the subject. It is considered important to know the trends and plans that NFI officials have for their future development, as well as the concrete actions that can be employed to resolve the challenges they face.The results and conclusions presented in this chapter are drawn both from...

Tropical forest understory regeneration occurs rapidly after disturbance with compositional trajectories that depend on species availability and environmental conditions. To predict future tropical forest regeneration dynamics, we need a deeper understanding of how pulse disturbance events, like hurricanes, interact with environmental variability to affect understory demography and composition. We examined fern and sapling mortality, recruitment, and community composition in relation to solar radiation and soil moisture using 17 years of forest dynamics data (2003–2019) from the Canopy...

The taxonomy of sculpins (Cottus, Cottidae) remains one of the last major unresolved puzzles in the systematics of North American freshwater fishes. We used molecular approaches to identify candidate taxa and their distribution across western North America. We crowd-sourced the collection of specimens (n = 8272) via outreach to biologists in the western United States and Canada. From that collection, we sequenced - at up to 2 mitochondrial and 2 nuclear genes - a subset (n = 4009) of specimens from most basins in the western United States, added sequences from public sequence databases,...

The goal of this study is to develop geospatial-hydrology models incorporating design rainfall intensities and land morphologic features to identify erosion hazards and vulnerability risks to road culverts/stream crossings in three watersheds at USDA Forest Service long-term experimental forests: i) Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, NC, ii) Santee Experimental Forest, SC, and iii) Alum Creek Experimental Forest, AR. These models developed in an ArcGIS ModelBuilder platform were: i) Streambank Erosion Vulnerability Assessment (SBEVA) and ii) Modified Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation...

Mangrove forests provide important ecosystem services to the human society and nature including mitigation of climate change. The quality and quantity of ecosystem services offered by mangrove forests are however at risk when mangroves are degraded. The restoration of mangrove areas is considered as a natural solution to recover lost ecosystem services such as securing of carbon stocks. This study was set to assess the extent to which mangrove planting activities compensate for the loss of biomass carbon stocks and other structural attributes in Rufiji Delta- Tanzania through analysis of...

Hurricanes alter forest habitat by opening the canopy and depositing fresh wood and leaves. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the effects of hurricane and drought-driven changes to forests on green litter decomposition, invertebrate communities, and nutrient mineralization over a short period (6 months) after disturbance. We used three complete replicated blocks with two canopy treatments: control and trim + detritus. Green leaves were enclosed in litterbags of three different mesh sizes to determine the effect of soil fauna of varying body sizes. Litterbags were retrieved from...

The temporal dynamics of forest canopy structure are influenced by disturbances that alter vegetation quantity and distribution. While canopy structural indicators such as leaf area index (LAI), canopy cover, and canopy height have been widely studied in the context of disturbance, the post-disturbance temporal dynamics of structural complexity, which summarizes the heterogeneity of vegetation arrangement, are poorly understood. With the goal of advancing conceptual and empirical understanding of the temporal dynamics of structural complexity following disturbance, we synthesized results...

In this study, we calibrated and tested the Soil Conservation Service Curve Number (SCS-CN) based Modified Sahu-Mishra-Eldo (MSME) model for predicting storm event direct runoff (Qtot) and its soil saturation coefficient α as a threshold antecedent moisture condition for partitioning into overland surface and shallow subsurface runoff components. The model calibration was performed using 36 storm events from 2008 to 2015 on a 160-ha low-gradient forested watershed (WS80) on poorly drained soil. The model was further validated without calibration using data from 2011 to 2015 on two sites...