Treesearch

Land managers in the Lake Tahoe basin are considering increasing the use of prescribed fire and forest thinning to restore conditions that will be more resilient to wildfires. However, such restorative treatments also constitute disturbances that could increase sediment and nutrient loads. We examined whether the water-quality impacts from future treatments are likely to be lower compared to the potential impacts from future wildfires under various climate change scenarios. We applied an online interface for the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model in combination with a landscape...

Climate change will accelerate forest mortality due to insects, disease, and wildfire. As a result, substantial resources will be necessary where and when forest managers seek to maintain multiple management objectives. Because of the increasing managerial requirements to offset climate change and related disturbances, the uncertainty about future forest conditions is magnified relative to climate change alone. We provide an analytical approach that quantifies the key drivers of forest change—climate, disturbance, and forest management—using scenarios paired with simulation modeling to...

Across the United States, wildfire severity and frequency are increasing, placing many properties at risk of harm or destruction. We quantify and compare how different forest management strategies designed to increase forest resilience and health reduce the number of properties at risk from wildfire, focusing on the Lake Tahoe Basin of California and Nevada. We combine landscape change simulations (including climate change, wildfire, and management effects) with scenarios of current and plausible fuel treatment activities and parcel-scale fire risk analysis. Results suggest that more...

In 2012, we evaluated the effects of hardwood cerambycid pheromones (syn-2,3-hexanediol, 3-hydroxyhexan-2-one, and 3-hydroxyoctan-2-one) on catches of bark and woodboring beetles in ethanol-baited multiple-funnel traps in two field trials in Oregon and Washington, United States of America. Catches of Phymatodes aeneus LeConte (Coleoptera; Cerambycidae) in ethanol-baited traps increased with the addition of 3-hydroxyhexan-2-one lures or the 3,2-hydroxyketone lure blend (3-hydroxyhexan-2-one 3-hydroxyoctan-2-one). Catches of the predator Thanasimus undatulus (Say) (Coleoptera; Cleridae) in...

Hurricanes commonly disturb and damage tropical forests. Hurricane frequency and intensity are predicted to change under the changing climate. The short-term impacts of hurricane disturbances to tropical forests have been widely studied, but the long-term impacts are rarely investigated. Modeling is critical to investigate the potential response of forests to future disturbances, particularly if the nature of the disturbances is changing with climate. Unfortunately, existing models of forest dynamics are not presently able to account for hurricane disturbances. Therefore, we implement the...

Species coexistence is governed by availability of resources and intraguild interactions including strategies to reduce ecological overlap. Gray foxes are dietary generalist mesopredators expected to benefit from anthropogenic disturbance, but populations have declined across the midwestern USA, including severe local extirpation rates coinciding with high coyote and domestic dog occurrence and low red fox occurrence. We used data from a large-scale camera trap survey in southern Illinois, USA to quantify intraguild spatial and temporal interactions among the canid guild including domestic...

Wood modifications are becoming popular as a way to enhance the performance of wood, either to make it more durable, improve the performance of wood, or give it new functionality as a multifunctional or smart material. While wood modifications have been examined since the early 1900s, the topic has become a dominant area of study in wood science over the past decade. This review summarizes recent advances and provides future perspective on a selection of wood modifications, i.e., the methods that are currently commercialized (acetylation, furfurylation, and thermal modification), a...

The South’s production of pulpwood decreased from 60.4 million cords in 2019 to 57.0 million cords in 2020. Roundwood production decreased by 4.1 million cords to 42.4 million cords and accounted for 74 percent of the South’s total pulpwood production. The use of wood residue increased 5 percent to 14.6 million cords in 2020. Georgia and Alabama led the South in total production, with 9.6 and 9.0 million cords, respectively. In 2020, 74 mills were operating and drawing wood from the 13 Southern States.

We used historical and contemporary survey data to assess the dynamics in two old-growth forests at Savage Mountain, Maryland, versus secondary forests from the surrounding landscape of the northern Allegheny Mountain Plateau (AMP). This is the first published compilation of witness trees from western Maryland. The oldgrowth forests on Savage Mountain, Maryland, are presently dominated by mixed oak (Quercus spp. L.; 42%), red maple (Acer rubrum L.), and black birch (Betula lenta L.). Witness trees (1620-1825) from Savage Mountain were dominated by mixed oak (55%), hickory (Carya spp.;...

The regulation of seasonality has been an area of interest for decades, yet global climate change has created extra urgency in the quest to understand how sensory circuits and neuroendocrine control systems interact to generate flexibility in biological timekeeping. The capacity of temperature to alter endogenous or photoperiod-regulated neuroendocrine mechanisms driving seasonality, either as a direct cue or through temperature-dependent effects on energy and metabolism, is at the heart of this phenological flexibility. However, until relatively recently, little research had been done on...