Treesearch

While urban areas are being threatened by water shortage due to climate change and rapid population growth, effects of urban development patterns on future municipal water shortage are rarely investigated. We address this aspect of urbanization by assessing the impacts of sprawl vs. high-density patterns on future changes in the sub-annual water shortage intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) relationships. The City of Fort Collins, Colorado, water supply system is chosen as a representative region that is rapidly developing over the last decades. The future water supply is estimated using the...

The National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS) is conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program, to collect information on the attitudes, behaviors, and other characteristics of America’s private forest ownerships. This report provides documentation and results from the 2017-2018 iteration of the NWOS, which is referenced by the terminal year, 2018. The particular focus of the results in this report is family forest ownerships with 10+ acres of forest land; other groups of forest ownerships will be the focus of separate reports. A brief...

Field deployable computer vision wood identification systems can be relevant in combating illegal logging in the real world. This work used 764 xylarium specimens from 84 taxa to develop an image data set to train a classifier and identify 14 commercial Colombian timbers. We took images of specimens from various xylaria outside Colombia, trained and evaluated an initial identification model and then collected additional images from a Colombian xylarium (BOFw) and incorporated these images to refine and produce a final model. The specimen classification accuracy of this final model was ~...

Airborne laser scanning (ALS) acquisitions provide piecemeal coverage across the western US, as collections are organized by local managers of individual project areas. In this study, we analyze different factors that can contribute to developing a regional strategy to use information from completed ALS data acquisitions and develop maps of multiple forest attributes in new ALS project areas in a rapid manner. This study is located in Oregon, USA, and analyzes six forest structural attributes for differences between: (1) synthetic (i.e., not‐calibrated), and calibrated predictions, (2)...

Height-to-crown-base (HTCB) measurements are frequently used as inputs for growth and yield models. They are essential for reliable projections of stand structure over time required for sustainable forest management. Often, HTCB is measured alongside total height (HT) for only a subsample of trees and must be imputed for unobserved measurements in the sample. Typically, HTCB models require HT as a covariate, requiring a “double” imputation for missing HTCB measurements, leading to potentially substantial error propagation issues. We compared the effects of subsample size, imputation...

The estimation of the sampling variance of point estimators under two-dimensional systematic sampling designs remains a challenge, and several alternative variance estimators have been proposed in the past few decades. In this work, we compared six alternative variance estimators under Horvitz-Thompson (HT) and post-stratification (PS) point estimation regimes. We subsampled a multitude of species-specific forest attributes from a large, spatially balanced national forest inventory to compare the variance estimators. A variance estimator that assumes a simple random sampling design...

Stands are the primary unit for tactical and operational forest planning. Forest managers can use remote-sensing-based forest inventories to precisely estimate attributes of interest at the stand scale. However, remote-sensing-based inventories typically rely on models relating remote-sensing information to forest attributes for fixed area plots with accurate coordinates. The collection of that kind of ground data is expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, remote-sensing-based inventories provide precise descriptions of the forest when the remote-sensing data were collected, but they...

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), and the USDA Forest Service are engaged in integrated research and action to manage forests for culturally significant plants within portions of traditional Cherokee homelands. The effort seeks to support EBCI arts, food sovereignty, and cultural practices while promoting coordinated forest stewardship guided by Cherokee knowledge. The focus area includes the Qualla Boundary (EBCI tribal lands); the Pisgah, Nantahala, and Cherokee National Forests; and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Examination of synergistic efforts to date suggests...

1. Host selection and utilization by ambrosia beetles ranges from healthy trees to weakened, dying, or dead trees. Compared to weakened trees, healthy trees emit little to no ethanol, which is stress‐induced and a by‐product of anaerobic respiration. The current study tested the attraction of two invasive ambrosia beetles, Kuroshio shot hole borer (KSHB), one member of the species complex, Euwallacea nr. fornicatus, and fruit‐tree pinhole borer, Xyleborinus saxesenii, to four treatments with or without ethanol. 2. GC–MS analyses confirmed the release of ethanol from the ethanol lure and...