Treesearch

On a 20-acre bog in the Marcell Experimental Forest in northern Minnesota, 10 open-topped chambers rise more than 23 feet out of the peatland, connected by walkways that seem to float over a layer of Sphagnum moss. "Some people have compared it to the science fiction scene of an alien landing spot on planet Earth," says Stephen Sebestyen, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service's Northern Research Station (NRS), and one of the scientists collaborating on this study. "In reality, what this turns out to be is, the world's largest climate change experiment."

If you walk through a northern hardwood forest in the Lakes States region today, you'll likely experience something different than your ancestors would have centuries ago. Instead of a variety of species, including eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), paper birch (Betula papyrifera), and eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) saplings, you'll likely see a proliferation of sugar maples (Acer saccharum), their iconic leaves soaking up the sunlight. According to Christel Kern, a research forester with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service's Northern Research Station (NRS), "There has...

Oak-dominated ecosystems in the eastern United States rely on periodic fire to create conditions that are conducive to oak regeneration. However, concern about reducing timber quality has made some managers wary of using fire as a management tool. A team of Northern Research Station scientists, foresters, and ecologists are collaborating to assess timber quality by inventorying trees across multiple national forests that have varied prescribed fire histories. Their findings indicate that economic damage to overstory timber value from prescribed fire is usually minimal, particularly...

When a tree falls in the woods, should it be removed? In managed forests, common practices call for cleaning up and removing timber following a blowdown. But when Northern Research Station research forester Christel Kern sees the root mass of a fallen tree, she's more likely to see it as an opportunity. Her work is described in a 2019 Forest Ecology and Management article entitled Mounds Facilitate Regeneration of Light-Seeded and Browse-Sensitive Tree Species After Moderate-Severity Wind Disturbance.

For 20 years, the Climate Change Tree Atlas has given foresters insight into tree species trends and how possible future climate scenarios may affect eastern tree species' habitat suitability. The Climate Change Tree Atlas recently underwent a major overhaul. Now even more resources are available to land managers looking for detailed data sets and maps on species traits, habitat quality, land cover, and dispersal potential for most tree species in the eastern United States. Tables and maps on the website are intended to inform land managers and landowners about their forests and enable...

Shared stewardship for the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS), or the creation of partnerships, is integral to the completion of basic and fundamental stewardship tasks within wilderness (e.g., trail work, Leave No Trace education, monitoring). However, successful wilderness shared stewardship is impeded by a variety of barriers, which are institutional (e.g., employee turnover), practical (e.g., lack of staff, limited informational resources about how to set up partnerships), and conceptual (e.g., ambiguity surrounding what wilderness shared stewardship is). There has been...

Visitor use in wilderness has grown over the past several decades, along with research focused on visitor use management (VUM) in congressionally designated wilderness. This scoping review of research published between 2000 and 2020 explores the distribution and representativeness of wilderness VUM research within the context of (a) the federal land management agencies administering wilderness and (b) the geographic distribution of research. Findings indicate wilderness administered by the Bureau of Land Management and US Fish and Wildlife Service were disproportionately understudied...

Models of relationships among forest inventory sampling efficiency and cluster plot configuration variables inform decisions by inventory planners. However, relationships vary under different spatial heterogeneity scenarios. To improve understanding of how spatial patterns of forests affect these relationships, we implemented a factorial experiment by simulating forest pattern at both the landscape and stand scales. We sampled these simulated forests with a variety of cluster plot configurations, calculated coefficient of variation (CV) of trees per hectare for each replicate, and tested...

Small area estimation is a powerful modeling technique in which ancillary data can be utilized to "borrow" additional information, effectively increasing sample sizes in small spatial, temporal, or categorical domains. Though more commonly applied to biophysical variables within the study of forest inventory analyses, small area estimation can also be implemented in the context of understanding social values, behaviors, and trends among types of forest landowners within small domains. Here, we demonstrate a method for deriving a continuous fine-scale land cover and ownership layer for the...

Hurricanes cause billions of dollars in damage annually in the United States and are projected to increase in intensity in the coming years. By exploring historical patterns of hurricanes and exposure of these hurricane-force winds across the landscape, areas of potentially high threat to future hurricane winds can be revealed. Combining potential threats from hurricane winds with forest data reveal the areas with the greatest potential threats to this important resource. Not surprisingly, most of the threats to forests occur in the Southeast, but the greatest threats to urban forests...