Treesearch

Recent fire seasons brought a new fire reality to the western US, and motivated federal agencies to explore scenarios for augmenting current fuel management and forest restoration in areas where fires might threaten critical resources and developed areas. To support this effort, we modeled the scheduling of an accelerated forest and fuel management scenario on 76 western US national forests. Specifically, we modeled a 10-year ramp up of current forest and fuel management that targeted the source of wildfire exposure to developed areas and simulated treatment in areas that accounted for 77%...

Recent extreme wildfire seasons in the United States (US) have rekindled policy debates about the underlying drivers and potential role forest management can play in reducing fuels and future wildfire. Most US western national forests face a substantial backlog of treatments and manifold management issues related to wildfire, forest health, and wildfire protection and constitute the major part of the wildfire problem. However, the precise schedule and detailed assessments that map the type and amount of treatments needed, as well as the associated cost are rarely assessed. We simulated...

Understanding the relationship between soil disturbance and tree growth is key to sustainable forest management. We report fifteen-year tree growth results of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca [Beissn.] Franco) and western white pine (Pinus monticola Dougl. ex D.Don) growth following clearcut harvesting and installation of three replicates of the international Long-Term Soil Productivity (LTSP) trial protocols. Additional amelioration plots were also established on each replicate site to study rehabilitation of the most severe disturbance, treatment of Armillaria root disease,...

In the past several decades, field studies have shown that woody plants can access substantial volumes of water from the pores and fractures of bedrock1-3. If, like soil moisture, bedrock water storage serves as an important source of plant-available water, then conceptual paradigms regarding water and carbon cycling may need to be revised to incorporate bedrock properties and processes4-6. Here we present a lower-bound estimate of the contribution of bedrock water storage to transpiration across the continental United States using distributed, publicly available datasets. Temporal and...

Tree size-density dynamics can inform key trends in forest productivity along with opportunities to increase ecosystem resiliency. Here, we employ a novel approach to estimate the relative density (RD, range 0-1) of any given forest based on its current size-density relationship compared to a hypothetical maximum using the coterminous US national forest inventory between 1999 and 2020. The analysis suggests a static forest land area in the US with less tree abundance but greatly increased timber volume and tree biomass. Coupled with these resource trends, an increase in RD was identified...

Native pollinator populations across the United States are increasingly threatened by a multitude of ecological stressors. Although the drivers behind pollinator population declines are varied, habitat loss/degradation remains one of the most important threats. Forested landscapes, where the impacts of habitat loss/degradation are minimized, are known to support robust pollinator populations in eastern North America. Within heavily forested landscapes, timber management is already implemented as a means for improving forest health and enhancing wildlife habitat, however, little is known...

Each year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory, Durability and Wood Protection research work unit (FS RWU 4723) installs and/or observes plots of soil treated with candidate termiticide products. These products may or may not be available to pest management professionals (PMPs) for application, depending on federal and state registration. This article reports on the latest results of these studies, and provides data for those products that have reached federal registration. Data provided are limited to label-approved rates of application...

Wheat straw was rapidly fractionated using maleic acid (MA) as an acid hydrotrope at atmospheric pressure under a range of conditions. MA hydrotropic fractionation (MAHF) was very selective in dissolving lignin and hemicelluloses resulting in a cellulose-rich water insoluble solids (WIS), which was evaluated for producing fibers through bleaching and cellulosic nanofibrils by fibrillation, as well as glucose through enzymatic saccharification. The residual lignin (RL) within the WIS has a low degree of condensation, which eased bleaching. The RL was also carboxylated through MAHF, which...

Litter decomposition is a key process for carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems and is mainly controlled by prevailing environmental conditions, substrate quantity and quality as well as microbial community abundance and composition. In particular, the effects of climate and atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition on litter decomposition and its temporal dynamics are of significant importance, since their effects might change over the course of the decomposition process. Within the TeaComposition initiative, we incubated Green and Rooibos teas at 524 sites across nine biomes....

While it is known that modifying the hydroxyls in wood can improve the decay resistance; what is often missing in the literature is whether these modifications alter wood nanostructure, and how these changes correlate to the improved decay resistance. Here, we used SANS to probe the effects of alkylene oxide modification on wood nanostructure. Southern pine wood samples were chemically modified to various weight percentage gains (WPG) using four different alkylene oxides: propylene oxide (PO), butylene oxide (BO), epichlorohydrin (EpH) and epoxybutene (EpB). After modification, the samples...