Treesearch

Haven't heard of irregular shelterwood? Don't worry, it's a newer term for professional foresters, too. Irregular shelterwood was developed in Europe and has recently been adapted for North American forests. Practicing foresters say that they have been doing irregular shelterwoods for a while primarily on private lands, but just didn't have the right terminology for it until recent times.

Identifying the potential for natural soil microbial communities to predictably affect complex plant traits is an important frontier in climate change research. Plant phenology varies with environmental and genetic factors, but few studies have examined whether the soil microbiome interacts with plant population differentiation to affect phenology and ecosystem function. We compared soil microbial variation in a widespread tree species (Populus angustifolia) with different soil inoculum treatments in a common garden environment to test how the soil microbiome affects spring foliar phenology...

Mechanistic, individual-based simulation models have been used for >25 years to overcome well-known limitations of “habitat suitability” models. InSTREAM 7 is the latest of our individual-based models for predicting the effects of flow and temperature regimes on stream salmonid populations. Unlike PHABSIM (or other methods based on habitat “quality,” e.g., as net rate of energy intake), inSTREAM mechanistically represents specific effects of flow and temperature on all life stages, and how those effects combine into testable predictions of population measures such as abundance, relative...

Forests provide the most stable and highest quality water supplies among all land uses. Quantitatively evaluating the benefits of forest water supply functions is important to effectively mitigate the impacts of land development, climate change, and population growth. Here, by integrating a water balance model and national drinking water data, we determined the amount of surface water yield originating on different forest ownership types at a fine resolution (88,000 watersheds) and tracked that water through the river network to drinking water intakes and the populations they serve. We...

Despite the social and ecological importance of residential spaces across the country, scant research examines urban yard management policies in the U.S. Governance scholarship points to the implementation challenges of navigating policy language. Our research provides an exploration of yard ordinance language, with implications for communities across the U.S. Specifically, we sought to determine whether — and in what instances — vegetation- and groundcover-related yard ordinances in the U.S. are ambiguous or clear. Our findings suggest that ordinances are often ambiguous when referring to...

Environmental changes are anticipated to generate substantial impacts on carbon cycling in peatlands, affecting terrestrial-climate feedbacks. Understanding how peatland methane (CH4) fluxes respond to these changing environments is critical for predicting the magnitude of feedbacks from peatlands to global climate change. To improve predictions of CH4 fluxes in response to changes such as elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations and warming, it is essential for Earth system models to include increased realism to simulate CH4 processes in a more mechanistic way. To address this need, we...

An examination of hardwood lumber prices in the eastern United States adjusted for inflation and regional differences in forest composition found declines in aggregate (combined species) prices across all regions. Still, the movements of the three aggregate prices examined were highly correlated among regions. The greatest declines in lumber price occurred in the Northeast and Lake States regions, with smaller declines occurring in the Central, Southern, and Mid-Atlantic regions. With the exception of white oak and walnut, prices of high-value species declined more than prices of low-value...

The advantages of clonal forestry have been well described, but little progress has been made in the identification of phenotypes best suited to this method in high-value hardwood species. The genetic variation within, clonal repeatability (broad-sense heritability) of, and Pearson's correlations among phenological, morphological, physiological, and growth traits (N = 22) of black walnut (Juglans nigra L.) were investigated using 25 grafted clonal genotypes. The trees were grown at wide spacing (4.6 m × 6.1 m) in an intensively managed plantation in north-central Indiana, USA. Clonal...