Treesearch

Across the U.S.A., as across many countries, families, individuals, trusts, estates, and family partnerships, collectively referred to as family forest ownerships, own a plurality of the forestland. The Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators (C&I) were used to assess the sustainability of these lands. There are currently 109 million ha of family forestland across the conterminous U.S.A., but this area is decreasing by 1 million ha yr-1 with 64% of this acreage going to non-forest uses and the rest going to other forest ownership classes. While forest-type groups have remained relatively...

Harvested wood products found in the built environment are an important carbon sink, helping to mitigate climate change and their trends in use are determined by economic and demographic factors which vary spatially. Spatially detailed projections of construction and stored carbon are needed for industry and public decision making, including for appreciating trends in values at risk from catastrophic disturbances. We specify econometric models of single family and multifamily housing starts by U.S. Census Region, design a method for their spatial downscaling to the county level, and...

With global efforts to restore grassland ecosystems, researchers and land management practitioners are working to reconstruct habitat that will persist and withstand stresses associated with climate change. Part of these efforts involve movement of plant material potentially adapted to future climate conditions from native habitat or seed production locations to a new restoration site. Restoration practice often follows this plant-centered, topdown approach. However, we suggest that restoration of belowground interactions, namely between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi or rhizobia,...

Both global poverty and hunger have increased in recent years, endangering progress towards accomplishing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1 and 2. The regression has been most pronounced in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Meeting the SDG targets requires achieving resilient farm productivity. Although many farm management technologies exist to improve yields, farmers in SSA largely have not adopted these approaches. A long-standing literature about technology adoption identifies multiple hypotheses as to why farmers may or may not adopt new agricultural technologies, culminating in numerous...

The ability to detect diseased trees before symptoms emerge is key in forest health management because it allows for more timely and targeted intervention. The objective of this study was to develop an in-field approach for early and rapid detection of beech leaf disease (BLD), an emerging disease of American beech trees, based on supervised classification models of leaf near-infrared (NIR) spectral profiles. To validate the effectiveness of the method we also utilized a qPCR-based protocol for the quantification of the newly identified foliar nematode identified as the putative causal...

Fine roots serve as the primary interface between trees and the soil, and they are dynamic in their response to environmental conditions. Among many functions, they are principle in gathering nutrients and water, and they constitute a major component of the tree. Their overall contribution to soil carbon flux is not well understood, nor is the effect of site and genotype on their dynamics, and these factors are crucial to understanding nutrient cycles and tree growth under variable conditions. This study evaluated how the fine root dynamics of loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) might be...

Wildfires are increasingly understood as an ecological driver within the entire Arctic biome. Arctic soils naturally store large quantities of C, as peat has formed throughout the Holocene. For the Siberian Arctic, we used observations from the MODIS remote sensing instrument to document changes in frequency, geographic extent, and seasonal timing of wildfires as well as vegetation productivity (GPP, NPP, EVI).We also used correlation and regression analysis to identify environmental factors of temperature, precipitation, and lightning occurrence associated with these changes. For the...

There is little doubt that changes in climate will affect wildlands, wildland fire, and suppression of fire (Abatzoglou and Kolden 2013, Abt et al. 2009, Flannigan et al. 2005, Flannigan et al. 2006, Flannigan et al. 2016, Littell et al. 2009, Littell at al. 2016, Liu et al. 2014, McKenzie et al. 2016, Mitchell et al. 2014, Prestemon et al. 2009, Riley et al. 2019, Westerling et al. 2006). Direct increases in area burned and numbers of large fires, resulting from more days with extreme fire weather, longer periods of sequential days with extreme fire weather, and longer fire seasons in...

There has been a significant increase in the use of wood pellets for energy in the past decade due in large part to their climate mitigation potential. Because of this, the demand for wood pellets is largely driven by policy, as well as socioeconomic development, making projections of future wood energy markets highly uncertain. The aim of this study is to provide projections of future wood energy market trends under five distinct socioeconomic scenarios based on the assumed future evolution of gross domestic product, population, technological change, trade openness, and bioenergy preferenc...

In the United States, the forest products industry loses an estimated $500 million to $1 billion annually to illegal logging. Once illegally harvested wood is removed from the forest, it’s difficult for USDA Forest Service law enforcement to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the wood was illegally harvested. The use of DNA is a recent development that can help law enforcement determine if wood is illegally sourced. Researchers Rich Cronn and Laura Hauck with the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station developed DNA forensic protocols to evaluate bigleaf maple wood products...