Treesearch

Landscape change is an ongoing process for even the most established landscapes, especially in context to urban intensification and growth. As urbanization increases over the next century, supporting bird species' populations within urbanizing areas remains an important conservation challenge. Fundamental elements of the biophysical structure of urban environments in which bird species likely respond include tree cover and human infrastructure. We broadly examine how tree cover and urban development structure bird species distributions along the urban-rural gradient across multiple spatial...

Urban foraging provides city dwellers with numerous ecosystem services, but this humannature interaction is largely missing from the urban ecosystem services scholarship. This exploratory study aims to address this gap in the literature and examines the benefits and values associated with foraging in New York City, United States. We focus on Russianspeaking mushroom foragers, a previously unstudied community. Data from 10 interviews reveals that for some groups, foraging is primarily about cultural ecosystem services, with a provisioning attribute. Foraging supports multiple benefits, most...

The USDA Forest Service anticipated that COVID-19 outbreaks among fire management personnel would potentially impact the agency’s ability to maintain the readiness of the wildland fire system and to respond to large complex wildfires across the country. In response, the agency implemented emergency action plans across the United States in March 2020 to reduce spread of COVID-19. When pandemic conditions were first emerging and information about how to mitigate risk of the virus was highly uncertain, fire personnel were learning to adapt their everyday work practices and to navigate an...

Conservation practices (CPs) are integral to maintaining the long-term viability of agro-ecological systems. Because farming systems and farmers’ values and attitudes are heterogeneous, factors that consistently predict conservation behaviors remain elusive. Moreover, heterogeneity is present among studies regarding the type of CPs examined, and whether behavioral intentions or actual behaviors were measured. This study considers the characteristics of each CP, and whether a given study measured behavioral intention or actual behavior, to better understand farmers' adoption of CPs. We...

Firewood and wood packaging material (WPM) are major pathways for moving bark- and wood-infesting insects (borers). Heat treatment regulations for interstate firewood movement vary among U.S. states: from 56°C for 30 min to 71.1°C for 75 min. Current WPM international standards (ISPM 15) require heating to a minimum of 56°C for 30 min throughout the profile of the wood. Using bolts from infested ash (Fraxinus), birch (Betula), oak (Quercus), and pine (Pinus) trees in Michigan, we assessed borer mortality at core temperatures of 50, 53, 56, and 60°C maintained for 30 min in chambers set to...

Chestnut blight is the primary factor that constrains American chestnut populations in North America. However, genetic and environmental factors unrelated to blight tolerance also infl uence chestnut health and productivity. Furthermore, these infl uences may be particularly important in novel environments, such as a species' range limit. One way to examine the infl uences of genetics and the environment on tree performance is to grow trees from across a species’ range together in a common garden where environmental conditions are more uniform and diff erences among seed sources can be...

Eruptive population dynamics of forest insect species regularly attract the interest of ecologists but also often evoke debates among stakeholders concerning impacts that outbreaks or pest control activities have on forest communities including insectivorous birds. Lymantria dispar is the most serious native defoliator in mixed oak-broadleaf forests in Central Europe. To investigate the treatment effects of L. dispar density, aerial application of the insecticide Mimic (tebufenozide) and nest box accessibility for L. dispar caterpillars on nest box success of cavity nesting birds, we...

The geographical distributions of non-native forest insects and pathogens (pests) result from a multitude of interacting abiotic and biotic factors. Following arrival, the presence of suitable host trees and environmental conditions are required for pests to establish and spread, but the role of forest biodiversity in this process is not well-understood. We analyzed county-level data for 22 non-native forest pests in the conterminous United States, developing species-specific models to investigate the effects of spatial contagion, human activities, and host and non-host tree biomass or...

Disruption of plant–pollinator interactions by invasive predators is poorly understood but may pose a critical threat for native ecosystems. In a multiyear field experiment in Hawai'i, we suppressed abundances of globally invasive predators and then observed insect visitation to flowers of six native plant species. Three plant species are federally endangered (Haplostachys haplostachya, Silene lanceolata, Tetramolopium arenarium) and three are common throughout their range (Bidens menziesii, Dubautia linearis, Sida fallax). Insect visitors were primarily generalist pollinators, including...

Over time, community forests (CFs) have been established across the globe to meet various social, economic, and ecological needs. Benefits of CFs include conserving resilient forests and natural resources and ecosystem services, enhancing social and economic capital, and leveraging local and indigenous knowledge in forest and natural resource management and decision making. Research on CFs in the U.S. is quite limited, and cases that have been assessed show a wide spectrum in terms of CFownership, organizational structure, governance, property rights, and uses. Through an exploratory...