Treesearch

There are many field guides available about invasive plants and their identification. The purpose of this field guide is to give a brief scientific synthesis of what is known about the behavior of select invasive species in managed, disturbed, and pristine forested systems. It also provides key information for accurate identification. Such information will be helpful when prioritizing research questions and choosing the best control strategies. Control methods for each species are not provided. The most successful control methods are most often site-specific; overgeneralizing control...

Determining feeding relationships is central to understanding biological control potential in the field. However, methods to differentiate actual (or realized) feeding relationships from potential feeding relationships is lacking especially for small, generalist predators such as lady beetles. In this study, we used DNA metabarcoding approaches to characterize actual feeding relationships of lady beetles (Coccinellidae) in the field and validated our methods with a lab study. We first asked whether high-throughput amplicon sequencing (HTS) can characterize diets of lady beetles ranging...

Unlike streamflow, which can be sampled in aggregate at the catchment outlet, evapotranspiration (ET) is spatially dispersed, challenging large-scale age estimation. Here, we introduce an approach for constraining the age of ET via mass balance and present the minimum flux-weighted age of ET across the continental United States using distributed, publicly available water flux data sets. The lower-bound constraint on ET age can be calculated by assuming that ET is preferentially sourced from the most recent precipitation through a last-in, first-out algorithm. From 2012 to 2017, ET was at...

1. Bats play crucial ecological roles and provide valuable ecosystem services, yet many populations face serious threats from various ecological disturbances. The North American Bat Monitoring Program (NABat) aims to use its technology infrastructure to assess status and trends of bat populations, while developing innovative and community-driven conservation solutions. 2. Here, we present NABat ML, an automated machine-learning algorithm that improves the scalability and scientific transparency of NABat acoustic monitoring. This model combines signal processing techniques and convolutional...

Water budgets are essential for characterizing water supplies from snow-dominated upland catchments where data are sparse, groundwater systems are complex, and measurements are prone to error (ε). One solution is imposing water budget closure (CWB) by ignoring difficult-to-measure variables, including inter-basin groundwater fluxes (G) and ε. However, conventional CWB-based analyses, which derive evapotranspiration (ET) from precipitation (P) and streamflow (Q) (e.g., the Budyko hypothesis), are limited in their ability to take advantage of recent advances in ETproducts, physically-based...

This summary report provides results of the ninth forest inventory of the forests of Wisconsin conducted by the USDA Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program. There are an estimated 17 million acres of forest land across the State which is a small decrease from the 2014 estimate. There are 11.5 billion live trees at least 1 inch diameter at breast height (d.b.h.)/diameter at root collar (d.r.c.) on this forest land. Growing-stock volume on timberland totaled 22.4 billion cubic feet, led by sugar maple and red maple with 2.5 billion cubic feet and 2.3 billion cubic feet,...

Survival of planted seedlings following a regeneration harvest can be challenging and early interventions through silvicultural treatments may be required for successful stand establishment. We tested the influence of soil amendment (biochar plus compost, compost-only, or control) and vegetation control (VC; applied either initially or annually for five years using brush saws) on the growth and survival of jack pine at three sites in northern Minnesota. Application of the biochar plus compost soil amendment increased seedling survival by 30% relative to the control in the first year, but...

Developing and implementing landscape-scale management strategies capable of balancing the need for restoring natural fire regimes and promoting ecosystem resiliency for future climate change remains an urgent need globally. To help guide development of a landscape management strategy capable of meeting multiple objectives, five alternative landscape management scenarios for reducing the risk of uncharacteristically severe wildfire using thinning or managed and prescribed wildfire were developed by local forest managers in the Lake Tahoe region of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Effects of...

Water management in snowy mountainous regions hinges on forecasting snowmelt runoff. However, droughts are altering snowpack-runoff relationships with ongoing debate about the driving mechanisms. For example, in 2021 in California, less than half of predicted streamflow arrived. Mechanisms proposed for this “missing” streamflow included changes in evapotranspiration (ET), rainfall, and subsurface moisture conditions. Here, we demonstrate that ETin drought years generates dry subsurface conditions that reduce runoff in subsequent years. A model including this legacy of depleted moisture...