Treesearch

Meeting forest restoration goals requires establishment and growth of seedlings that can thrive for many decades. Often, this requires use of nursery-grown plants. Despite their obvious role, however, nurseries can be considered a low priority and/or overlooked during the planning process.

On the USDA Forest Service National Forest System, reforestation and restoration plans often require tree seedlings and native plant seed to expedite achieving a desired future condition following timber harvests, wildfires, and outbreaks of disease and insect pests. The seed and seedlings used by the agency for these purposes are produced by its Genetic Resource Program and its Nursery System, State forestry offices and other public agencies, and the commercial forest nursery and native seed industries. The Forest Service National Seed Laboratory (NSL) was established in 1954 to support...

At a fundamental level, smoke from wildland fire is of scientific concern because of its potential adverse effects on human health and social well-being. Although many impacts (e.g., evacuations, property loss) occur primarily in proximity to the actual fire, smoke can end up having a significant social impact far from the source. This dynamic, combined with lengthening fire seasons, suggests that understanding how wildland fire smoke affects diverse social values will be increasingly critical. This chapter reviews the existing scientific knowledge related to wildland fire smoke with...

Smoke from wildland fire is a significant concern to resource managers who need tools, knowledge, and training to analyze, address, and minimize potential impacts; follow relevant rules and regulations; and inform the public of possible effects. Successful navigation of competing pressures to appropriately use fire on the landscape to manage fire-adapted and fire-dependent ecosystems, while protecting public health and other air quality values, depends on credible science and tools conceived of and developed in partnership between managers and the research community. Fire and smoke...

The contribution of non timber forest products (NTFPs) has been acknowledged globally for their role in conservation, income generation, livelihood improvement and rural development. The potential of a NTFP-based bioeconomy has given a new dimension to the forest sector, and NTFPs are now considered favourably by the resource rich developing economies. The actual contribution of NTFPs has never been adequately estimated due to lack of sufficient baseline information on extraction, consumption patterns and traded quantities in Kashmir, India. Complicated management frameworks and fragmented...

This report presents the strategic direction for research at the Rocky Mountain Research Station to address climate change challenges in the context of resilience, disturbance, and recovery. It describes how current and future RMRS research programs could be enhanced and applied to address emerging challenges.

The reestablishment of natural fire regimes can have numerous benefits for forest ecosystems, including the restoration of stand structure through a reduction in tree densities and increased representation of large diameter trees. However, fire effects may depend on how departed the ecosystem is from its historical fire frequency. Red fir (Abies magnifica) forests occupy a broad geographic area across which historical fire return intervals and stand structures vary. Using historical stand inventory data from the Vegetation Type Mapping (VTM) project, we evaluated red fir forests in the...

Recent drought and bark beetle outbreaks in California have resulted in substantial impacts to forest ecosystems throughout the state, with thousands of acres in need of restoration or reforestation. This user-friendly, Web-based decision support tool is designed to assess priority areas for reforestation activities where tree mortality is high within the national forests of the Sierra Nevada bioregion. The tool consists of three components: (1) spatial prioritization tool, (2) stand data summary tool, and (3) reforestation best management practices guide. The spatial prioritization tool...

Although cellulose nanomaterials have promising properties and performance in a wide application space, one hinderance to their wide scale industrial application has been associated with their economics of dewatering and drying and the ability to redisperse them back into suspension without introducing agglomerates or lose of yield. The present work investigates the dewatering of aqueous suspensions of cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) using ultrasound as a potentially low-cost, non-thermal, and scalable alternative to traditional heat-based drying methods such as spray drying. Specifically, we...