Treesearch

Riparian forests across the continental United States are heavily invaded by Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii (Rupr.)), an invasive shrub which suppresses native plants, homogenizes community structure and composition, and alters ecosystem processes. However, no studies have quantified the impacts of honeysuckle removal on forest canopy structure across the first decade of restoration. In this study we used a portable canopy LiDAR (PCL) to characterize the immediate (<1 year), short-term (1–2 years) and long-term (>10 years) impacts of honeysuckle removal on the horizontal and vertical...

Little is known about how spatial literacy influences mapping and decision-making related to environmental management and ecosystem services. We assessed the role of spatial landscape literacy in participatory environmental management and ecosystem service assessments in peri-urban Bogota, Colombia. Spatial landscape literacy (SL) was evaluated by testing stakeholder’s ability to locate specific landscapes and landmarks. We then assessed if opinions on environmental decisions and ecosystem services were significantly related to SL. We used an online instrument to capture 2,397 respondent’s...

Sugar pine, Pinus lambertianaDouglas, is a keystone species of montane forests from Baja California to southern Oregon. Like other North American white pines, populations of sugar pine have been greatly reduced by the disease white pine blister rust (WPBR) caused by a fungal pathogen, Cronartium ribicola, that was introduced into North America early in the twentieth century. Major gene resistance to WPBR segregating in natural populations has been documented in sugar pine. Indeed, the dominant resistance gene in this species, Cr1, was genetically mapped, although not precisely. Genomic...

Forest communities—assemblages of tree species at stand- to landscape-scales—vary in their capacity to capture and store carbon, but previous attempts using discrete forest types to quantify this relationship often fail to consider gradual changes to the seedling, live tree, and standing dead tree demographic components of the community. We analyzed two decades of plot remeasurements (20,680 remeasurements of 5594 unique plots) from the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Program across the Great Lakes region of the eastern U.S. to...

Ecological disturbance is a key agent shaping the spatial and temporal landscape of food availability. In forests of western North America, disturbance from fire can lead to resource pulses of deadwood-associated arthropods that provide important prey for woodpeckers. Although the foraging strategies among woodpecker species often demonstrate pronounced differences, little is known about the ways in which woodpeckers exploit and partition prey in disturbed areas. In this study, we employed DNA metabarcoding to characterize and compare the arthropod diets of 4 woodpecker species in Washingto...

Highly disturbed forests are commonplace throughout the eastern United States and their residing composition and structure is reflective of their past land use. Management and restoration efforts are complicated by diverse and abundant nonnative invasive plants, including Ailanthus altissima. Verticillium nonalfalfae has been identified as a potential native mycoherbicide option for Ailanthus. To test the efficacy of Verticillium on Ailanthus we designed a study in highly disturbed forests of southern Ohio. At each of five sites, we monitored symptomology, mortality, and rate of spread of...