Treesearch

Hybrid poplars (Populus sp.) are increasingly implemented in agroforestry systems across the U.S., mainly for their biomass production, carbon allocation, and ecosystem services. While agroforestry systems are usually established on marginal land, soil amendments, such as paper mill fibercake residuals, can provide necessary nutrients such as nitrogen (N) to increase poplar yield. To assess the effects of such amendments on poplar early growth and establishment, three clones (Populus deltoides Bartr. ex Marsh × P. maximowiczii A. Henry 'DM114'; P. deltoides× P. nigra L. 'DN170'; P. nigra×...

• The success of invasive plants is influenced by many interacting factors, but evaluating multiple possible mechanisms of invasion success and elucidating the relative importance of abiotic and biotic drivers is challenging, and therefore rarely achieved. • We used live, sterile or inoculated soil from different soil origins (native range and introduced range plantation; and invaded plots spanning three different countries) in a fully factorial design to simultaneously examine the influence of soil origin and soil abiotic and biotic factors on the growth of invasive Pinus contorta. • Our...

Freshwaters are important, interconnected, and imperiled. Aquatic ecosystems, including freshwater fishes, are closely tied to the terrestrial ecosystems they are embedded within, yet available spatially explicit datasets have been underutilized to determine associations between freshwater fishes and forested areas. Here, we determined the spatial co-occurrence between freshwater fish distributions and forests within 2129 watersheds of the conterminous United States. We identified 21% of freshwater fishes as associated with forested areas, and 2% as strictly present only in highly forested...

Airborne volcanic ejecta (tephra) can strongly influence forest ecosystems through initial disturbance processes and subsequent ecological response. Within a tephra-disturbed forest, large trees may promote plant growth and create favorable sites for colonization. Three primary ways trees can influence posteruption vegetation response include: (1) amelioration of volcanic substrates, (2) providing source propagules from the tree or from associated epiphytes, and (3) sheltering understory vegetation, thereby increasing the rate of recovery near tree bases. Here, we evaluate Valdivian...

Bats are renowned for their sophisticated echolocation. However, recent research has indicated that bats may be less reliant on echolocation than has long been assumed. To test the hypothesis that bats reduce their use of echolocation to avoid eavesdropping by conspecifics, we deployed miniature tags that recorded ultrasound and accelerations on 10 wild hoary bats (Lasiurus cinereus) for one or two nights. This resulted in 997 10-s recordings. Bats switched between periods predominated by their typical high-intensity echolocation, or periods predominated by micro calls (unusually short,...

Humid tropical forests play a dominant role in the functioning of Earth but are under increasing threat from changes in land use and climate. How forest vulnerability varies across space and time and what level of stress forests can tolerate before facing a tipping point are poorly understood. Here, we develop a tropical forest vulnerability index (TFVI) to detect and evaluate the vulnerability of global tropical forests to threats across space and time. We show that climate change together with land-use change have slowed the recovery rate of forest carbon cycling. Temporal autocorrelation...

At the 1971 meeting North American Society for Bat Research (NASBR) in Albuquerque, Don Wilson and James S. Findley presented “Randomness in Bat Homing.” The central tenet of their paper was that homing ability in bats could be explained by chance alone or by some sort of random search [Wilson and Findley (Am Nat 106:418–424, 1972)]. In this retrospective, we assess the knowledge gained from, but also the limitations of, older studies on bat homing and review the advances in our understanding of homing and navigation in bats. Although we have learned much over the last half-century about...

Despite the increasing challenges wildfires are posing around the globe, and the flourishing production of highquality wildfire scientific knowledge, the ability of fire science to impact knowledge on the ground, for people, society, economy, and the environment, in a way that facilitates change in the current wildfire management system has been limited. We believe that one reason for this limited impact is due to the fragmentation of this scientific knowledge. Therefore, we propose a Translational Wildfire Science (TWFS) as a new field of knowledge that captures the comprehensive dynamics...

Cave-hibernating bats are widespread in North America but are facing precipitous population declines due to the impacts of white-nose syndrome (WNS). It is in winter hibernacula that bats are most vulnerable to the fungus that causes WNS, but the locations of over-wintering sites in western North America are largely unknown. This poses a significant challenge for bat monitoring, disease surveillance, and management efforts at the disease front. To advance initiatives to locate bats on the landscape, we developed real-time PCR assays to detect big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) from environme...

Populus trichocarpa Torr. and Gray (black cottonwood) is an economically and ecologically important tree species native to western North America. It serves as a model tree species in biology and genetics due to its relatively small genome size, rapid growth, and early reproductive maturity (Jansson and Douglas 2007). Black cottonwood is susceptible to root rot caused by at least one species of Armillaria (Raabe 1962), a globally distributed genus that exhibits diverse ecological behaviors (Klopfenstein et al. 2017) and infects numerous woody plant species (Raabe 1962). However, several...