Treesearch

Context. Study of interplay of disturbance and forest succession is key to understand forest landscape dynamics, especially under changing climate and disturbance regimes. However, most such studies are from small spatial and temporal scales, and thus may be limited to generalize at large scales. Objectives. We investigate how typhoons affected forest dynamics at stand and landscape scales, whether the impacts differ among forest biomes, and whether a post-volcanic forest landscape could ultimately reach equilibrium under typhoon disturbances. Methods. We used landscape modelling to...

Acoustic inspection is a reliable tool for assessing biological deterioration in wood. As wood decays, several mechanical properties are negatively affected. A variety of acoustic techniques have been developed to identify, and in some cases quantify, the extent to which the presence of decay has altered the wood. Knowledge of the extent of decay allows an inspector to estimate strength loss of the wood structure. This report serves as an introduction to acoustic inspection of biologically deteriorated wood. Basic acoustic techniques are described. Percentage reductions of wood mechanical...

April 2022 data softness was widespread, with only the housing under construction and private residential construction spending categories positive on a monthover-month basis. Year-over-year data were better; however, single-family permits were negative again. This marks the third month in 2022 of single-family starts declining, and permits also have decreased for two consecutive months. This suggests further moderation in single-family activity in the upcoming months. Completions continue to be restrained due to the inaccessibility of building materials and products, combined with other...

Using interview data with civic environmental stewardship groups in New York City (n = 26), we identify strategies through which civic stewards engage in transboundary environmental governance and urban climate adaptation planning. Our findings articulate the diverse ways that civic stewards engage with planning in urban socio-ecological systems, as they (1) shape physical spaces, (2) broker partnerships, (3) disrupt the status quo, (4) build civic capacity, and (5) envision new futures. We contribute to the literature by embedding civic stewardship within urban planning discourse,...

Climate change (CC) conditions projected for many temperate areas of the world, expressed by way of excessive temperatures and low water availability, will impact forest health directly by means of abiotic stress but also by predisposing trees to pathogenic attack. However, we do not yet know how such environmental conditions alter the physiology and metabolism of trees to render them more susceptible to pathogens. To explore these mechanisms, we conditioned 3-year-old Austrian pine saplings to a simulated CC environment (combined drought and elevated temperatures), followed by pathogenic...

Understanding interactions among biogeochemical cycles is increasingly important as anthropogenic alterations of global climate and of carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) cycles interactively affect the Earth system. Ecosystem processes in the dryland biome, which makes up over 40% of Earth’s terrestrial surface, are often distinctively sensitive to small changes in resource availability, likely because levels of many resources are low. However, data also suggest that simultaneous changes in the availability of multiple resources may be necessary to affect a response in these...

Maintaining a diverse urban forest that provides ecosystem services can promote urban sustainability and resilience to environmental change. Around the world, cities have taken to inventorying their urban trees and quantifying their ecosystem services but more so in industrialized counties than in Latin America. Here we describe the results of an i-Tree inventory that established 206 survey plots in the National Municipal District of Santo Domingo (NMDSD). We used social-ecological theory to evaluate potential factors that may influence urban forest structure, composition, and ecosystem...

Oaks have been difficult to regenerate for the last 50 years, primarily due to changes in the disturbance regime, herbivore pressure, a wetter climate, and lack of proven management prescriptions. Oak reproduction must be relatively large (e.g., > 3-4 ft) prior to overstory removal to be competitive, and understory light regimes in undisturbed forests are too low for small oaks to recruit into larger size classes. Treatments that target the midstory and understory, such as burning and herbicide, increase light levels that favor oak regeneration and reduce competitors, but planting in these...

Hurricane and tornado events cause significant damage to high-value timber in the United States each year. Forest managers and landowners are keenly interested in finding olutions to salvage and repurpose these downed timbers before they cause pest infestations and fire outbreaks, completely losing their value or increasing processing costs. To better understand the wood quality of the downed timber, we used acoustic waves techniques as a nondestructive testing approach to assess the wood degradation rate of downed trees and determine the extent of fracture and voids in the damaged...

Productivity measures in logging involve simultaneous recognition and classification of event occurrence and timing, and the volume of stems being handled. In full-tree felling systems these measurements are difficult to implement in an autonomous manner because of the unfavorable working environment and the abundance of confounding extraneous events. This paper proposed a vision method that used a lowcost camera to recognize feller-buncher operational events including tree cutting and piling. It used a fine K-nearest neighbors (fKNN) algorithm as the final classifier based on both audio...