Treesearch

Urban sustainability systems, including green, blue, and grey infrastructures and spaces, require ongoing coordination, collaboration, and comanagement in order to function. Municipal agencies often do not have the resources to maintain these systems alone and rely on a network of civic organisations and volunteers as well as job trainees, temporary employees, and welfare- to- work staff, alongside permanent public employees (Krinsky and Simonet, 2017). Civic groups, however, are more than just a labour force; they envision and shape the public realm in their own right. The majority of...

Wood is preferred as a building material due to its high strength, low weight, and ability to retain many of its properties even at moderately high temperatures. However, numerous wood adhesives lose strength as the temperature increases, especially around 200°C. This study examined bond strength at temperatures above that required for initiation of wood degradation for bonds of wood-to-wood and wood-to-aluminum using two oil-based adhesives (resole phenolics and epoxies) and two bio-based adhesives (soy protein isolate and ovalbumin from egg whites). The phenolics not only gave the best...

Proteins were useful as adhesives for wood bonding, including those derived from animals (collagen, casein, ovalbumin, and blood), and plants (soy, canola, and cottonseed). These proteins have different structures that dictate their wood adhesive performance. Hydrolyzed collagens from animal hides and bones are hot-melt adhesives suitable for paper applications with durability improved by crosslinking. Soy flour adhesives, even with a crosslinker, are amphiphilic, giving moderate wet-strength wood bonds, while with ovalbumin (egg whites) curing exposes hydrophobic surfaces leading to high...

Global forest ecosystems face growing threats from land use change, climate and weather extremes, and insects and diseases. Managing these threats is difficult due to the time, cost, and human error associated with the quality and quantity of data required for research and assessment. While conventional analytical methods are being improved constantly, they are often slow in providing information needed to respond promptly to unprecedented changes driven by both natural and anthropogenic alterations to forest ecosystems. For this reason, potential applications of artificial intelligence...

Widespread mortality poses a major conservation challenge for foundation species whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.). We assessed whitebark pine forest structure, composition, and persistence potential in Idaho and Nevada, USA following mountain pine beetle (MPB), wildfire, and no recent disturbance by comparing overstory and regeneration relative abundances, classifying postdisturbance communities, and gauging persistence via residual mature trees and seedlings. Wildfire mortality spanned all species and sizes and exceeded MPB mortality, which was limited to larger pines. Disturbance...

Projecting land use transitions onto a wall-to-wall raster requires an initial basemap of land use for the projection period. The 2020 Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment includes spatial realizations of county-level land use projections; these realizations are a collection of 90-meter resolution rasters that allocate the county-level projections across the conterminous United States (CONUS). The 2020 basemap is a 90-meter raster depicting land use across the CONUS circa 2020 and is used as the starting position for the spatial realizations. The basemap was created by fusing a modified...

A 2021 analysis of the urban forest in Minneapolis, Minnesota reveals that this area has an estimated 1.8 million live trees across all ownerships. The most common large diameter (11.0+ inches) tree species are hackberry, American elm, silver maple, bur oak, and honeylocust. Trees in Minneapolis are estimated to be currently storing about 228,000 tons of carbon (837,000 tons of carbon dioxide [CO2]) valued at $38.9 million. In addition, it is estimated that these trees annually remove about 26,000 tons of CO2 and about 774 tons of air pollution. Minneapolis’ urban forest is estimated to...

Forest ecosystems are ecologically, socially, and culturally valuable, and are essential to global sustainability, yet climate change and altered disturbance regimes are threatening the future of forests around the globe. Policies and regulations pertaining to forest conservation require reliable and informative measures of condition and management effectiveness to sustain these investments, but standardized methods for characterizing management impacts on multiple ecological resources are still lacking. Composite indicators provide a promising approach for quantifying forest resilience...

For decades, national participation in hunting has been on the decline. One population of hunters, however, is bucking the trend: Women. Studies on women in hunting often focus on barriers to participation, such as lack of leisure time, lack of experience, and lack of role models. But despite those barriers, women’s participation has been increasing. In 2022 an estimated 3 million women represented 22 percent of all hunters, more than double the number from 2016. Given this upward trend, there are still many unanswered questions about what motivates women to participate in hunting.

In the dry, fire-adapted forests of California’s Sierra Nevada - where yellow pine, mixed conifer, and red fir historically burned on frequent, low-to-moderate severity cycles - restoring historical fire regimes has been a guiding principle for ecological management. But most contemporary forests in this region are far from that benchmark. Instead, these forests have been shaped by decades of fire suppression, and increasingly, by megafires at the opposite extreme.