Treesearch

This resource update is a brief look at some of the basic metrics that describe the status of and changes to forest resources in Ohio. This information is based on field data collected using the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) annualized sample design, and it is updated yearly. Tables for Forests of Ohio, 2020 can be found at https://doi.org/10.2737/FS-RU-341-Tables. The FIA one-click application that generated this report can be found at https://doi.org/10.2737/FIA-One-Click-State-Report-v1.2.

An increasingly urbanized world is one of the most prominent examples of global environmental change. Across the globe, urban parks are designed and managed in a similar way, resulting in visually pleasing expansions of lawn interspersed with individually planted trees of varying appearances and functional traits. These large urban greenspaces have the capacity to provide various ecosystem services, including those associated with soil physicochemical properties. Our aim was to explore whether soil properties in urban parks diverge underneath vegetation producing labile or recalcitrant...

Wood decomposition is regulated by microbial community and soil conditions and plays an important role in global carbon cycling. Among many factors, local conditions, associated with forest age and the leaf litter adjacent to decaying wood may directly and indirectly influence microbial colonization and rate of decay. In this study, wood sticks with and without leaf litter were buried in young (50–70 years), old (120–150 years) and uncut (over 200 years) forests at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), Maryland, USA to test hypotheses about woody and foliar litter interactio...

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation recognizes the importance of accurately assessing the timber deck slab bridge inventory within the state. Of the 571 timber bridges in Wisconsin, 450 bridges are timber slab bridges. Current methods of load rating employ equations first developed in the later 1980s and early 1990s for determining the equivalent strip width. These equations often produce results that unnecessarily penalize the bridge by requiring a posted weight limit. Through a program of bridge live load tests and analytical modeling, the researchers in this study have both...

People have built roads and trails over the millennia to connect communities, facilitate commerce, enhance defense, and access resources. In the western United States, the United States Forest Service (USFS) has constructed and maintained a system of forest trails and roads since it’s inception in 1905, at first to provide access to remote locations to manage fires and later to provide access for timber harvest and other uses. Road construction over the last century has resulted in a network of over 380,000 miles on USFS lands. While these roads provide valuable access to remote areas, the...

The plastid genomes of photosynthetic green plants have largely maintained conserved gene content and order as well as structure over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Several plant lineages, however, have departed from this conservation and contain many plastome structural rearrangements, which have been associated with an abundance of repeated sequences both overall and near rearrangement endpoints. We sequenced the plastomes of 25 taxa of Astragalus L. (Fabaceae), a large genus in the inverted repeat-lacking clade of legumes, to gain a greater understanding of the connection...

Anticipating the next generation of forests requires understanding of recruitment responses to habitat change. Tree distribution and abundance depend not only on climate, but also on habitat variables, such as soils and drainage, and on competition beneath a shaded canopy. Recent analyses show that North American tree species are migrating in response to climate change, which is exposing each population to novel climate-habitat interactions (CHI). Because CHI have not been estimated for either adult trees or regeneration (recruits per year per adult basal area), we cannot evaluate migration...

Juvenile tree survival will play an important role in the persistence of coniferous forests and woodlands in the southwestern United States (SWUS). Vulnerability to climatic and environmental stress declines as trees grow, such that larger, more deeply rooted juveniles are less likely to experience mortality. It is unclear how juvenile conifers partition the aboveground and belowground components of early growth, if growth differs between species and ecosystem types, and what environmental factors influence juvenile carbon allocation above- or belowground. We developed a novel data set for...

A serious concern for nurseries is the potential for Phytophthora ramorumand other Phytophthoraspecies to colonize roots without inducing aboveground symptoms in plants that then serve as cryptic reservoirs of inoculum. Episodic abiotic stresses that reduce plant water potential can compromise the host resistance to trigger disease development from root and crown infections during many Phytophthora–plant interactions. We conducted a series of experiments with root-inoculated Rhododendronplants in a potting soil mix to assess the influence of excess salt or water deficit on ramorum blight...

This study investigates whether Phytophthoraspecies may have been repeatedly introduced in natural habitats through restoration projects. Six plant species across five research locations in three counties within the San Francisco Bay Area were tested for pathogen infection of stems, roots and for rhizosphere infestation at failing restoration sites. Where possible, the same hosts were evaluated in one neighboring un-restored site disturbed by the presence of culverts, drainages or trails that also intersected the restoration site, and in a naturally regenerated and undisturbed control...