Treesearch

Clean water from forests is commonly used to supply drinking water to communities both within and outside basin boundaries through inter-basin transfers (IBTs). Here, we modified the Water Supply Stress Index (WaSSI) model to provide estimates of mean water yield and the proportion of mean flow originating on forested lands at the 12-Digit Hydrologic Unit Code scale across the conterminous United States (CONUS). We accounted for the benefits of forests for drinking water supply and receiving populations through IBTs by incorporating a new IBT database, surface intake location information...

Fungal and enzymatic pre-treatments have long been used to activate the surface of lignocellulosic biomass particles or fibers to promote adhesion or develop novel composite materials and other products. Research into mycelium-based bio-composites, i.e. products in which constituents are bonded by fungal mycelium, is quite new and still growing. There has also been a significant amount of attention given to these materials by the industry and private sector. These bio-composites can be produced by enzymatically or fungally treating lignoicellulosic substrates and then either molding them...

Background: Illegal logging is a global crisis with significant environmental, economic, and social consequences. Efforts to combat it call for forensic methods to determine species identity, provenance, and individual identifcation of wood specimens throughout the forest products supply chain. DNA-based methodologies are the only tools with the potential to answer all three questions and the only ones that can be calibrated “non-destructively” by using leaves or other plant tissue and take advantage of publicly available DNA sequence databases. Despite the potential that DNA-based methods...

Computer vision wood identification (CVWID) has focused on laboratory studies reportingconsistently high model accuracies with greatly varying input data quality, data hygiene, andwood identification expertise. Employing examples from published literature, we demonstratethat the highly optimistic model performance in prior works may be attributed to evaluating thewrong functionality—wood specimen identification rather than the desired wood species or genusidentification—using limited datasets with data hygiene practices that violate the requirement of clearseparation between training and...

Plant species introduced to an area in response to intentional or accidental anthropogenic events are called nonnatives. If these species spread rapidly from introduction sites (Richardson et al., 2000) and have harmful effects on the economy, environment, or health (IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), 2000), they are invasive nonnative species. There are approximately 14,000 nonnative plant species established globally (van Kleunen et al., 2015, 2019) and between 2500 (Pysek et al., 2020) and 4375 (Pagad et al., 2018) of them are considered to be invasive. Invasive...

Deforestation is the dominant threat to tropical dry forests (TDFs) in Mexico. Its causes include agriculture, tourism, and mining. In some cases, unassisted forest regeneration is sufficient to return diverse forest cover to a site, but in other cases, changes in land use are so severe that active restoration is required to reintroduce tree cover. The ecological and social constraints on TDF restoration in Mexico are poorly understood. To address this knowledge gap, we synthesized relevant restoration literature for Mexico published between January 1990 and February 2020. We examined 43...

Wildfire is an understudied threat to biodiversity in many tropical landscapes, including island nations of the Pacific, such as The Republic of Palau—a global biodiversity hotspot with ridge-to-reef resources. Fires are known to occur on Palau’s main island of Babeldaob, where they can result in increased erosion rates and sediment delivery to near-shore areas with impacts to streams and coral reefs. Fire-adapted native plant species are found in savanna habitats, but fires often extend into adjacent forest areas where they kill overstory trees. To assess this serious biodiversity and...

January 2022 month-over-month and year-over-year housing data were mixed. Total, single-family, and multifamily housing starts, multifamily permits, total and single-family housing completions, new house sales, and existing sales were negative month-over-month. Single-family starts and permits, total housing and single-family completions, and new sales were negative year-over-year. Completions continue to be restrained due to the inaccessibility of building materials and products, combined with other factors. Consequently, individual builders may be reluctant to start new projects while...

Cellulose-based materials are increasingly finding applications in technology due to their sustainability and biodegradability. The sensitivity of cellulose fiber networks to environmental conditions such as temperature and humidity is well known. Yet, there is an incomplete understanding of the dependence of the fracture toughness of cellulose networks on environmental conditions. In the current study, we assess the effect of moisture content on the out-of-plane (i.e., z-dir.) fracture toughness of a particular cellulose network, specifically Whatman cellulose filter paper. Experimental...

Availability of and access to wood identification expertise or technology is a critical component for the design and implementation of practical, enforceable strategies for effective promotion, monitoring and incentivisation of sustainable practices and conservation efforts in the forest products value chain. To address this need in the context of the multi-billion-dollar North American wood products industry 22-class, image-based, deep learning models for the macroscopic identification of North American diffuse porous hardwoods were trained for deployment on the open-source, field-deployab...