Treesearch

Before the arrival of white-nose syndrome in North America, the northern long-eared bat (Myotis septentrionalis) was a common cavity-roosting bat species in central Appalachian hardwood forests. Two successive prescribed burns on the Fernow Experimental Forest, West Virginia, in 2008 and 2009, were shown to positively affect maternity colony day-roost availability and condition in the near-term. However, whether immediate benefits were temporary and if burned forests actually experienced an accelerated loss of trees and snags possibly suitable for bats more than background loss in unburned...

Active forest management operations, such as regeneration harvests, can reduce hazardous fuel loads and alter fuel structure, potentially minimizing extreme wildfire conditions while maintaining ecosystem services, such as wildlife habitat and water quality. Regeneration harvests of differing intensities (clearcut, high-retention shelterwood, and low-retention shelterwood) were first applied between 1995 and 1996 to three sites on the George Washington-Jefferson National Forest in the Ridge and Valley Province of Virginia, USA. Over two decades after the clearcut was conducted and 11–12...

Essentially all mature American chestnut trees in Ohio were killed by the chestnut blight in the 1920s and 1930s. However, chestnut sprouts that emerge from the base of the tree (the belowground "root collar") after the top dies are resistant to the blight while they remain small. Chestnut sprouts, though uncommon, persist in the understory of woodlands in southern and eastern Ohio today.

We present a new data set from the Marcell Experimental Forest (MEF) that compiles water isotope measurements from multiple research catchments, some of which have been studied since the 1960s. The MEF is located in northern Minnesota, USA, and is home to heavily studied and monitored forests, streams, bogs, and fens. Peat-forming systems (bogs and fens) are an important component of the MEF landscape and have a profound impact on the water cycle in these catchments. Within the last decade, analysis of stable isotopes of water (expressed as δD and δ18O) has been implemented to characterize...

Background: Despite the widespread use of prescribed fire throughout much of the southeastern USA, temporal considerations of fire behavior and its effects often remain unclear. Opportunities to burn within prescriptive meteorological windows vary seasonally and along biogeographical gradients, particularly in mountainous terrain where topography can alter fire behavior. Managers often seek to expand the number of burn days available to accomplish their management objectives, such as hazardous fuel reduction, control of less desired vegetation, and wildlife habitat establishment and...

Suppression of most wildland fire ignitions has defined fire management in the United States since 1935. These past suppression activities, along with climate change impacts and other factors, have resulted in longer fire seasons and increased frequency of large fires in many forest ecosystems across the western United States, thus resulting in a fire management crisis. But suppression has not been the default approach in a few large wilderness areas of the U.S. Northern Rocky Mountains: the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, and the Frank Church-River of No...

We conducted dendroclimatic analyses and constructed future growth projections for red spruce (Picea rubensSarg.) throughout the central Appalachians in the state of West Virginia. This study involved field sampling of 18 sites across red spruce’s range in six regions throughout the Monongahela National Forest that were selected based on pairwise combinations of three latitudinal groups (north, central, and south) with two aspects (north and south). Each combination of latitudinal group and aspect was referred to as a landscape cluster. Growth was negatively impacted by high summer...

Aim: The concept of "island disharmony" has been widely applied to describe the systematic over-and under-representation of taxa on islands compared to mainland regions. Here, we explore an extension of that concept to biological invasions. We compare biogeographical patterns in native and non-native beetle (Coleoptera) assemblages from around the world to test whether beetle invasions represent a random sample of species or whether some families are more prone to invade than others. Location: Global. Methods: Numbers of non-native beetle species established in ten regions worldwide were...

White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans which has resulted in the deaths of millions of bats across eastern North America. To date, hibernacula counts have been the predominant means of tracking the spread and impact of this disease on bat populations. However, an understanding of the impacts of WNS on demographic parameters outside the winter season is critical to conservation and recovery of bat populations impacted by this disease. We used long-term monitoring data to examine WNS-related impacts to summer populations in West Virginia,...

Documenting the sex of individuals encountered during wildlife research and monitoring activities is important for understanding and tracking changes in populations. However, sexing salamanders can be particularly difficult because secondary sex characters are often subtle or only visible during the breeding season, and guidance on species-specific sex determination is lacking from most field guides. The purpose of this guide is to provide a reference to assist biologists in the Central Appalachian region with identifying sex of live adult salamanders. In the main text we provide summary...