Treesearch

Approximately 2600 km of bison and elk trails have been mapped in West Virginia using historical records, including county histories and travelers' accounts with published dates between 1876 and 1977. Most points of interest associated with these trails document European bison or elk hunting events. We explore some potential uses of the digital trails data and discuss the limitations of the data and need for further refinements. This map of major bison trails (available for download at https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2021-0055) is an important resource for telling a more complete story of the...

Mosquitoes and the pathogens they carry are increasingly common in urban areas throughout the globe. With urban landscapes, the need to manage mosquitoes is driven by the health risks and nuisance complaints associated with mosquitoes. Controlling the number of mosquitoes may reduce the overall risk of disease transmission but may not reduce nuisance complaints. This study focuses on Maricopa County in Arizona, USA, to investigate the relationship between mosquito abundance and landscape-level and sociodemographic factors on resident perceptions of mosquitoes. We used boosted regression...

Development of a novel and efficient inverse method for anisotropic material identification based on a complex-variable formulation of Airy stress function is presented. The overall equilibrium and compatibility, as well as the free traction along the boundary of the internal geometric cutouts, are analytically satisfied by means of conformal mapping and analytic continuation. The inverse problem is posed as an optimization problem where the objective functional is the difference between the measured data and its counterpart evaluated using the complex-variable method. Validity of the...

Dead fungal mycelium (necromass) represents a critical component of soil carbon (C) and nutrient cycles. Assessing how the microbial communities associated with decomposing fungal necromass change as global temperatures rise will help in determining how these belowground organic matter inputs contribute to ecosystem responses. In this study, we characterized the structure of bacterial and fungal communities associated with multiple types of decaying mycorrhizal fungal necromass incubated within mesh bags across a 9°C whole ecosystem temperature enhancement in a boreal peatland. We found...

Fire has, does, and will shape forest structure, composition, and biodi-versity. In this book, we introduce the driving forces, historical patterns, and future management challenges of fire in forested ecoregions across the continental USA. Climate warming and decades of fire suppression or exclusion have altered historical fire regimes and threaten diversity of fire-adapted forest vegetation into the future. Historical fire regimes ranged from frequent, low-severity fires in some ecosystems to infrequent, high-severity fires in others. They were driven by interac-tions among climate,...

The role of fire in the eastern broadleaf and Appalachian forest regions, until recently, was poorly understood or minimally examined, as this region was long overlooked as a flammable landscape and fire was seen primarily as a threat to the timber resource and wildlife. In the past few decades, a significant body of research has enhanced our understanding of fire and its effects. We now recognize that fire has strongly shaped many ecosystems of this region along complex geo-morphological gradients, and that returning fire, or its absence, has significant con-sequences for forest structure,...

Quantifying the spatial variability of species-specific tree transpiration across hillslopes is important for estimating watershed-scale evapotranspiration (ET) and predicting spatial drought effects on vegetation. The objectives of this study are to (1) assess sap flux density (Js) and tree-level transpiration (Ts) across three contrasting zones a (riparian buffer, mid-hillslope and upland-hillslope, (2) determine how species-specific Jsresponds to vapour pressure deficit (VPD) and (3) estimate watershed-level transpiration (Tw) using Tsderived from each zone. During 2015 and 2016, we...

In the social sciences, the topic of imaginaries refers to socially constructed, taken-for-granted meanings about events, places, and people. Imaginaries are created symbolically and rhetorically, through claims about self, others, and places; they help people make sense of individual and shared experiences. This study explores how residents of a rural community discursively construct imaginaries to address tourism-related transitions. Telephone interviews were conducted with three types of residents (leaders, permanent residents, and second homeowners) in Burke, Vermont (USA). Results...

This is 1 of 23 guides to help Southeastern U.S. producers of economically important agricultural commodities build resilience to, prepare for, and recover from hurricane impacts. All guides can be found on the USDA Southeast Climate Hub Hurricane Preparation and Recovery Commodity Guides website.

Surface roughness – a key control on land-atmosphere exchanges of heat and momentum – differs between dormant and growing seasons. However, how surface roughness shifts seasonally at fine time scales (e.g., days) in response to changing canopy conditions is not well understood. This study: (1) explores how aerodynamic resistance changes seasonally; (2) investigates what drives these seasonal shifts, including the role of vegetation phenology; and (3) quantifies the importance of including seasonal changes of aerodynamic resistance in "big leaf" models of sensible heat flux (H). We evaluated...