Treesearch

Urban areas can be particularly vulnerable to climate change due to extensive impervious cover, increased pollution, greater human population densities, and a concentration of built structures that intensify impacts from urban heat, drought, and extreme weather. Urban residents are at risk from a variety of climate stressors, which can cause both physical and mental harm. Urban forests and tree cover provide a critical role in helping cities address climate change by supporting greenhouse gas mitigation, reducing the impacts of extreme heat and altered climate that impair human health, and...

Salmon and steelhead habitat restoration projects in the Pacific Northwest have frequently relied on the use of engineered logjams—logs that are cabled together and placed in rivers to create pools where young salmon can live and grow in their first year before migrating to the ocean. Monitoring programs that rely on fish counts have shown that these human-made pools function as intended by providing a healthy habitat for juvenile fish.But do the logjams affect stream habitat beyond the areas of the pools? Could they benefit entire river reaches?Carlos Polivka, a research fishery biologist...

Phosphorus (P) is an essential nutrient for all forms of life but its over-enrichment can result in eutrophication of surface waters. For many watersheds around the world, some seasonal total P (TP) load datasets may exist but the continuous and multi-year daily TP concentrations and/or load datasets are not available due to the lacks of in situ P sensor measurement, time-consuming, and budget constraint. Traditionally, the seasonal TP loads are normally obtained with measuring daily TP concentrations for a couple of times within a season in a watershed, and then these daily TP concentratio...

Terrestrial invasive species threaten the integrity of diverse and highly-valued ecosystems. The Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center (MITPPC) was established by the state of Minnesota to fund research projects aimed at minimizing harms posed by the most threatening terrestrial invasive species to the state's prairies, wetlands, forests, and agriculture. MITPPC used the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to identify and prioritize diverse invasive species threats. We describe how MITPPC tailored AHP to establish its research priorities and highlight major outcomes and...

Aim: Ecological relationships between species richness and biomass production are increasingly thought to be pervasive across the globe. Yet, diversity production relationships have not been explored extensively for freshwater fish communities even though fisheries production provides key services to humans. Our aim was to evaluate the diversity production relationship of fish communities inhabiting freshwater streams across the Appalachian Mountain range and examine how diversity-production relationships varied across streams possessing different thermal signatures. Location: Our study...

Alien arthropods threaten human health, jeopardize food supplies, endanger valued species, risk economic losses, and disrupt ecosystem functions, at least some of the time. The accelerating pace of commercial and social globalization creates unprecedented opportunities for the movement of species to new areas of the world. As arthropods are dispersed beyond their native ranges, they escape population-regulating predators, parasitoids, and pathogens and encounter naïve host plants and animals. In principle, the disruption of coevolutionary, antagonistic interactions presents an invading...

In 2017, a moisture monitoring study was initiated on an eight-story, mass timber building located in Portland, Oregon. A detailed description of the monitoring program and initial monitoring results from the first year of the program were published previously. It was discovered that by the end of Year 1, some of the mass timber components had not dried below 19% moisture content (MC). This technical note is a follow-up to the original paper to examine how the building changed over its first 3 years after construction. All of the locations monitored over 3 years have reached stable...

Soil and whole plant samples were collected from two natural populations of Appalachian black cohosh (Actaea racemose L.) to assess soil-plant-microbe interactions and determine seasonal mineral acquisition by the species. A. racemosa is one among medicinal forest plants subject to excessive harvesting, and there is increasing concern over the sustainability of natural populations. Following standard procedures, mineral content and chemistry of soils sampled from the two sites were determined, and monthly (May to August) A. racemosa root, stem, and leaf mineral content were analyzed. Fresh...

Forest management planning requires the specification of measurable objectives as desired future conditions at spatial extents ranging from stands to landscapes and temporal extents ranging from a single growing season to several centuries. Effective implementation of forest management requires understanding current conditions and constraints well enough to apply the appropriate silvicultural strategies to produce desired future conditions, often for multiple objectives, at varying spatial and temporal extents. We administered an online survey to forest managers in the eastern US to better...