Treesearch

Globalization and economic growth are recognized as key drivers of biological invasions. Alien species have become a feature of almost every biological community worldwide, and rates of new introductions continue to rise as the movement of people and goods accelerates. Insects are among the most numerous and problematic alien organisms, and are mainly introduced unintentionally with imported cargo or arriving passengers. However, the processes occurring prior to insect introductions remain poorly understood. We used a unique dataset of 1,902,392 border interception records from inspections...

Understanding flame spread and combustion dynamics in surface fuels is important for both planning and evaluating the impact of prescribed fires. However, prescribed fires tend to be conducted under light and unsteady wind conditions as compared with those which have been well studied for wildfire scenarios. To improve this understanding and provide data for next-generation fire models, it is necessary to collect detailed time-resolved observations of these processes. To accomplish this, a series of small-scale field experiments was conducted in pine needle litter. 10 m x 10 m plots were...

Species ranges are forecast to change in response to warming temperatures and altered precipitation patterns, yet tree migration rates fail to track the pace of climate change. In anticipation of these changes, various forest adaptation management strategies have been broadly proposed, including intentionally modifying species composition via assisted migration of future climate adapted species. Despite the potential utility of these adaptation measures, practical evaluations are limited, particularly those applied to meet other ecological objectives such as supporting vulnerable, underrepr...

Manganese (Mn) may play an outsized role in soil biogeochemical cycles relative to its abundance. The role of Mn-facilitated oxidation of biomacromolecules during litter decomposition is well-established, but the balance between Mn-promoted soil organic carbon (SOC) oxidation and long-term SOC protection in mineral soils is unknown, especially in subsoils. In this study, we used soils collected across the US National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to assess the distribution of Mn and relationships between Mn abundance and SOC concentration, potential mineralization, and persistence...

In the age of big data, soil data are more available and richer than ever, but – outside of a few large soil survey resources – they remain largely unusable for informing soil management and understanding Earth system processes beyond the original study. Data science has promised a fully reusable research pipeline where data from past studies are used to contextualize new findings and reanalyzed for new insight. Yet synthesis projects encounter challenges at all steps of the data reuse pipeline, including unavailable data, labor-intensive transcription of datasets, incomplete metadata, and...

Family forest owners (FFOs) hold a plurality of forestland in the United States, and programs and markets exist that compensate landowners for sequestering and storing increased carbon through extended rotations, improved forest management, and increased forest cover. We used USDA Forest Service National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS) data from 2018 to estimate the number of ownerships and their associated acreage that are enrolled, that are familiar but not enrolled, and that are unfamiliar with these programs, as well as differences in attributes among these groups. As of 2018, less than...

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...