Treesearch

Emerging plant pathogens have been increasing exponentially over the last century. To address this issue, it is critical to determine whether these pathogens are native to ecosystems or have been recently introduced. Understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes fostering emergence can help to manage their spread and predict epidemics/epiphytotics. Using restriction site-associated DNA sequencing data, we studied genetic relationships, pathways of spread and the evolutionary history of Phellinus noxius, an emerging root-rotting fungus of unknown origin, in eastern Asia, Australia...

Although bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus) and tailed frogs (Ascaphus montanus) have coexisted in forested Pacific Northwest streams for millennia, these iconic cold‐water specialists are experiencing rapid environmental change caused by a warming climate and enhanced wildfire activity. Our goal was to inform future conservation by examining the habitat associations of each species and conditions that facilitate co‐occupancy. We repurposed data from previous studies in the northern Rocky Mountains to assess the efficacy of bull trout electrofishing surveys for determining the occurrence...

Forest ecosystems sequester approximately half of the world’s organic carbon (C), most of it in the soil. The amount of soil C stored depends on the input and decomposition rate of soil organic matter (OM), which is controlled by the abundance and composition of the microbial and invertebrate communities, soil physico-chemical properties, and (micro)- climatic conditions. Although many studies have assessed how these site-specific climatic and soil properties affect the decomposition of fresh OM, differences in the type and quality of the OM substrate used, make it difficult to compare and...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, US public land managers faced the challenge of catering to large increases in camping demand, while maintaining social distancing guidelines. In this paper, we use multivariate linear regression to analyze weekly changes in reservations to US Forest Service (USFS) campgrounds between 2019 and 2020. The regression models estimate the impact of local COVID infection rates, public health restrictions, and spatial spillovers from proximity to National Parks (NPs), metropolitan areas and wildfire on camping demand. Our sample includes 1,688 individual USFS campgroun...

Wildfires emit smoke particles and gaseous pollutants that greatly aggravate air quality and cause adverse health impacts in the western US (WUS). This study evaluates how wildfire impacts on air pollutants and air toxics evolve from the present climate to the future climate under a high anthropogenic emission scenario at regional and city scales. Through employing multiple climate and chemical transport models, small changes in domain-averaged air pollutant concentrations by wildfires are simulated over WUS. However, such changes significantly increase future city-scale pollutant concentra...

A new nonparametric solution to the two-sample problem for quantiles is proposed. This solution is applicable to small samples and/or extreme quantiles, and it prioritizes limiting Type I error to the indicated level of significance over optimizing power or confidence interval width. Aside from continuity, no assumptions about the distributions are made. In this approach, nonparametric random confidence intervals obtained from the samples are “melded,” resulting in a nonparametric confidence interval for the difference between the two population quantiles with a specified confidence level....

The U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities and the USDA Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory commissioned the Athena Sustainable Materials Institute to update four previous cradle-to-gate life cycle assessments (LCAs) of wood product resin systems (ureaformaldehyde (UF), melamine-urea-formaldehyde (MUF), phenol-formaldehyde (PF), and phenol-resorcinol-formaldehyde (PRF) as developed by Wilson 2009 [1] and develop new cradleto-gate LCAs for melamine-formaldehyde (MF), emulsion polymer isocyanate (EPI) and polymer emulsion polyurethane (PEP) wood resins. This LCA project has been...

Urban parks provide many ecosystem services, and conserving biodiversity is one of the most important among them. Keeping track of biodiversity indices and their evolution over time is a useful procedure for preserving biodiversity within urban habitats. The paper presents an application of the R programming language and the R package “vegan” for calculating alpha and beta diversity indices for dendroflora in urban parks. The case study includes five major parks in the city of Novi Sad, Serbia: Danube, Futog, Kamenica, Liman and Railway park. The alpha indices calculated in the paper are...

The paper compares two multi-criteria methods, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the best–worst method (BWM), in assessing criteria related to the quality of urban parks. The criteria assessed were accessibility, location, biodiversity preservation, park equipment, water elements, terrain configuration, cultural and historical value, and the presence of small architectural objects. Five decision-makers participated in the research, having expertise in urban greenery, urban forestry, environmental protection, landscape design, and cultural and historical heritage. The results of...

Tropical forest degradation (e.g., anthropogenic disturbances such as selective logging and fires) alters forest structure and function and influences the forest’s carbon sink. In this study, we explored structure-function relationships across a variety of degradation levels in the southern Brazilian Amazon by 1) investigating how forest structural properties vary as a function of degradation history using airborne lidar data; 2) assessing the effects of degradation on solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) seasonality using TROPOMI data; and 3) quantifying the contribution of...