Treesearch

Forested landscapes around the world face ever growing challenges in restoring resilience in the face of climate change. Large-scale disturbances, including wildfires and insect infestations, continue to grow in magnitude and destructiveness. Wildfires specifically pose major risks to human life and wellbeing. At the same time, forested landscapes produce innumerable benefits for society, including climate regulation through carbon sequestration, recreational opportunities, water provisioning, wood products, and more. The continued and reliable provisioning of these benefits relies on...

Consumer preferences are always changing, and wood species are not immune to those trends. Grain pattern, color, density, and other characteristics found in wood can play vital roles in how consumers decide which secondary wood products to purchase or, in the case of customized products, which species to select. This study investigated consumer perceptions of common and underutilized wood species available for use in secondary wood products, which addresses an evolving gap in understanding consumer decision-making. The research measured appearance-based evaluations of 10 different wood...

Hardwood lumber production in the United States reached a peak in 1999, with an estimated 12.6 billion board feet of output. However, the early 2000s ushered in a major structural shift – the large-scale offshoring of U.S. furniture manufacturing. Once the single largest user of hardwood lumber until the late 1970s, wood furniture has become the smallest major market for hardwood lumber today. As U.S. furniture production moved offshore, the industry shifted its focus toward housing and construction markets, which were entering a period of robust growth in the early 2000s. Sectors producing...

For the southern pines, interlocking stone cells (sclereids) are a fascinating periderm feature comprising only a small fraction of the outer bark (rhytidome), yet contributing greatly to its density/hardness. This study addresses the long-overdue need to carry out wet chemical analyses on periderm and obliterated phloem layers, the former herein limited to the stone cells. Extractives distributions by polarity were similar between loblolly pine ( Pinus taeda L.) periderm and wood samples; the total extractives content of the obliterated phloem was threefold higher. The claim that stone...

The 2020 inventory of the forests of the Northern Great Plains States (Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota) reports more than 6.6 million acres of forest land and more than 2.1 billion trees. Forest land is dominated by the ponderosa pine, sugarberry/hackberry/elm/green ash, and elm/ash/black locust forest types, which together occupy 43 percent of the total forest land area. The volume of growing stock on timberland currently totals 3.9 billion cubic feet. The average annual net growth of live trees from 2014 to 2020 was 162.5 million cubic feet per year. This report includes...

The invasive hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae Annand) continues to threaten the survival of eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carr.) and Carolina hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana Engelm.) in eastern North America. Effective restoration efforts will require an integrated understanding of how these species respond to management interventions under current environmental pressures. This study examined the early growth, survival, and pest resilience of eastern and Carolina hemlock seedlings planted under varying competition control, insecticide treatment, and light availability regimes....

Maintaining and promoting forest ecosystem health and landscape management is a global challenge, given the social, ecological, and economic value of forests, the threats that they face from climate change and other stressors, and the substantial funding gap relative to the need to accomplish management objectives. The practice of calculating an economic Return on Investment (ROI) in business applications has migrated to conservation and land management planning as a means of informing and improving the positive impact of investments on forested landscapes. Forest management yields a large...

Wildfires adjacent to highly populated Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) areas are increasingly impacting urban communities in terms of post-fire costs and displacement of populations. But community perception of these socioeconomic and ecological costs, or ecosystem disservices (EDs), before catastrophic events like the 2025 Los Angeles Fires is little understood. Thus, understanding how experts and the urban public perceive fire-related EDs, relative to the risk reduction benefits of prescribed fire, is key. We used a 2023 survey (n= 869) from communities within Greater Los Angeles as well...

Laurel wilt is a vascular disease caused by a non‐native pathogen ( Harringtonia lauricola ) and an associated beetle vector (redbay ambrosia beetle; RAB; Xyleborus glabratus ) affecting several members of the Lauraceae family in North America, including the ecologically and culturally important sassafras ( Sassafras albidum ). Since discovery of the vector in 2002 and the disease in 2004 near Savannah, GA, laurel wilt has spread widely throughout the eastern United States, causing widespread mortality to redbay, sassafras, and other lauraceous species. The objective of this study was to...

Biochar, a carbon-rich material that can be produced from forest byproducts and waste, is emerging as a valuable material for removing heavy metal ions from aqueous solutions. Biochar can be produced by many processes and equipment. Among these, mobile air curtain burners, developed to achieve lower levels of particulate matter and smoke than open pile burning, can be deployed in the field where biomass feedstocks are located. To elucidate lead metal ion (Pb2+) removal mechanisms, this study characterized seven biochars generated by a novel mobile curtain burner, representing the first...