Treesearch

This resource bulletin describes the principal findings of the 2019 forest inventory of Oklahoma (conducted January 13, 2010 to July 6, 2021)—the first report on a complete, annualized inventory of central and western Oklahoma, and changes since the previous report, Oklahoma’s Forests, 2014. The survey finds nearly 12 million acres in Oklahoma are forest land, mostly in private ownership. These forest lands contain more than 5 billion trees, 10 billion cubic feet of wood, and 250 million short tons of biomass. Net change in volume was positive, with an increase of 93.9 million cubic feet.

Forests around the world serve a wide variety of functions, from providing habitats for many species to delivering economic benefits for communities. Conserving forests is often seen as a cost to commercial forestry in that removing land from production could reduce wood supply and jobs. Research led by scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, however, shows that increased conservation may not necessarily come at a cost.A new study published in Nature Communications by researchers at the Forest Products Laboratory and the Southern Research Station, and their...

Traditional empirical fire danger rating systems are largely based on generalized historical weather-fire relationships. By contrast, fire behavior models incorporate interactions among weather, fuels and topography to simulate fire spread across landscapes, offering opportunities for wildfire danger evaluation.This study is to develop a novel Wildfire Danger Assessment and Forecast (WDAF) framework that estimates daily fire spread potential using spatially explicit fire simulations.The framework integrates weather, fuel and topographic data into a fire behavior model to simulate daily...

This report provides detailed estimates and highlights key findings from Forest Inventory and Analysis data collected across the State of Mississippi from 2017 to 2023; a remeasurement of plots sampled between 2006 and 2017. Estimates of forest area, volume, biomass, and timber product output are provided across land ownerships, forest types, and forest demographics throughout the State. Mississippi covers approximately 31 million acres, 19.2 million acres (62 percent) of which is considered forest land. This report evaluates trends in land-use change as well as current forest land...

Forested landscapes around the world face ever growing challenges in restoring resilience in the face of climate change. Large-scale disturbances, including wildfires and insect infestations, continue to grow in magnitude and destructiveness. Wildfires specifically pose major risks to human life and wellbeing. At the same time, forested landscapes produce innumerable benefits for society, including climate regulation through carbon sequestration, recreational opportunities, water provisioning, wood products, and more. The continued and reliable provisioning of these benefits relies on...

Consumer preferences are always changing, and wood species are not immune to those trends. Grain pattern, color, density, and other characteristics found in wood can play vital roles in how consumers decide which secondary wood products to purchase or, in the case of customized products, which species to select. This study investigated consumer perceptions of common and underutilized wood species available for use in secondary wood products, which addresses an evolving gap in understanding consumer decision-making. The research measured appearance-based evaluations of 10 different wood...

Hardwood lumber production in the United States reached a peak in 1999, with an estimated 12.6 billion board feet of output. However, the early 2000s ushered in a major structural shift – the large-scale offshoring of U.S. furniture manufacturing. Once the single largest user of hardwood lumber until the late 1970s, wood furniture has become the smallest major market for hardwood lumber today. As U.S. furniture production moved offshore, the industry shifted its focus toward housing and construction markets, which were entering a period of robust growth in the early 2000s. Sectors producing...

For the southern pines, interlocking stone cells (sclereids) are a fascinating periderm feature comprising only a small fraction of the outer bark (rhytidome), yet contributing greatly to its density/hardness. This study addresses the long-overdue need to carry out wet chemical analyses on periderm and obliterated phloem layers, the former herein limited to the stone cells. Extractives distributions by polarity were similar between loblolly pine ( Pinus taeda L.) periderm and wood samples; the total extractives content of the obliterated phloem was threefold higher. The claim that stone...

The 2020 inventory of the forests of the Northern Great Plains States (Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota) reports more than 6.6 million acres of forest land and more than 2.1 billion trees. Forest land is dominated by the ponderosa pine, sugarberry/hackberry/elm/green ash, and elm/ash/black locust forest types, which together occupy 43 percent of the total forest land area. The volume of growing stock on timberland currently totals 3.9 billion cubic feet. The average annual net growth of live trees from 2014 to 2020 was 162.5 million cubic feet per year. This report includes...

The invasive hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae Annand) continues to threaten the survival of eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carr.) and Carolina hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana Engelm.) in eastern North America. Effective restoration efforts will require an integrated understanding of how these species respond to management interventions under current environmental pressures. This study examined the early growth, survival, and pest resilience of eastern and Carolina hemlock seedlings planted under varying competition control, insecticide treatment, and light availability regimes....