Treesearch

When discussing structural southern yellow pine lumber, questions frequently are asked regarding changes over time. This is a significant area of discussion given that structural lumber properties (i.e., design values) were changed around 2012. Climate change, forest management, genetics, processing, and others are listed among the many possible contributing factors. Of interest are these questions: (1) Are changes in bending properties permanent at some fundamental level, or are they somewhat dynamic and responsive to controllable factors? (2) To what degree have the basic southern pine...

The interrelationships among specific gravity (SG), modulus of elasticity (MOE), and strength (modulus of rupture, MOR) are largely the foundational basis for non-destructive evaluation and testing. Resource monitoring and commercial structural lumber production often rely upon such non-destructive evaluation to predict the bending and/or tension strength of individual members. These technologies require routine calibration. In addition, it is important to know the extent to which a given resource may change over time. To that end, this study investigated the relationship among SG, MOE,...

Indigenous communities in the Pacific West of North America have long depended on fire to steward their environments, and they are increasingly asserting the importance of cultural burning to achieve goals for ecological and social restoration. We synthesized literature regarding objectives and effects of cultural burning in this region within an ecosystem services framework. Much scholarly literature focuses on why various species harvested from burned areas were important historically, while tribes and recent research increasingly stress a wide range of ecological and cultural benefits...

Climate, a primary driver for fire activity, is important for fire management. Climate information is necessary for understanding and predicting fire regimes, seasonal and inter-annual variability, and future trends. Most wildfires are up to tens of kilometers in size, while global climate models usually have horizontal resolutions of hundreds of kilometers. Therefore, downscaling is required to provide high-resolution climate information for fire management applications. The climate and fire communities have made great strides in developing and applying climate downscaling techniques....

Wildfire predictions provide useful information for fire management planning and implementation. Temperature and precipitation have been used as the primary meteorological predictors for wildfires in China. This study is to improve the prediction skills of long-range (monthly, seasonal, and annual) wildfires in China by identifying other important meteorological predictors. Provincial data during 1999–2020 were used to calculate the correlations between fire properties (fire count and burned area) and meteorological variables of maximum temperature, precipitation, relative...

The fire plume height (smoke injection height) is an important parameter for calculating the transport and lifetime of smoke particles, which can significantly affect regional and global air quality and atmospheric radiation budget. To develop an observation-based global fire plume-rise data set, a modified one-dimensional plume-rise model was used with observation-based fire size and Maximum Fire Radiative Power (MFRP) data, which are derived from satellite fire hotspot measurements. The resulting data set captured well the observed plume height distribution derived from the Multiangle...

Southeastern timber stands have been severely impacted by recent storms. Hurricanes have uprooted, shaken and broken trees across thousands of acres of forest lands. Tornados have snapped tree stems along 129 km (80 mile) linear paths. All ages of stands have been impacted. During some events, more wood is downed over the course of one or two days than would normally be harvested in a year. Salvage harvesting to recover some value for the landowner can be difficult because traditional forest products markets are based on a sustainable supply of wood over time. Mills are not equipped to...

Homelessness is often associated with urban areas, yet since the Great Depression, national forests have served as a refuge for individuals and families. In recent years, more people are living on the national forests and grasslands, whether by choice or because of economic circumstances. Unfortunately, the presence of nonrecreational campers affects the experience of other users and results in increased levels of trash and resource degradation that can be costly to remediate.In 2015, Lee Cerveny, a research social scientist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station,...

Propensity score matching (PSM) and distance-adjusted PSM enable estimation of causal effects from observational data by selecting controls that are similar to treated observations in terms of environmental covariates and spatial locations. Quantifying effects of natural disturbances such as wildfires often encounters limited availability of observational data due to the scarcity of ecological events or cost of data collection over large areas. Using empirical data of national forest inventory plot measurements, we conducted a sensitivity analysis of distance-adjusted PSM on data availabili...

This resource update is a brief look at some of the basic metrics that describe the status of and changes to forest resources in Arkansas. Estimates presented here are for the survey year 2020 with resource changes compared against the 2019 survey year. This information is based on field data collected using the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) annualized sample design, and it is updated yearly. Arkansas has about 5,700 sample plots across the State; each year, 20 percent of these plots (one panel) are visited and measured by field crews, the data compiled, and new estimates produced....