Treesearch

Caribou and reindeer across the Arctic spend more than two thirds of their lives moving in snow. Yet snow-specific mechanisms driving their winter ecology and potentially influencing herd health and movement patterns are not well known. Integrative research coupling snow and wildlife sciences using observations, models, and wildlife tracking technologies can help fill this knowledge void.

Resilience can seem like a buzzword in natural resource management, but it is also a concept with deep roots in ecological and sustainability science. In the context of urban forests, resilience has many meanings, including ecological, social, and institutional components, which are often intertwined. Broadly speaking, resilience refers to the capacity of systems to absorb stresses and changes, and recover from disturbances.

This summary report provides an overview of findings from the fourth annualized inventory of Missouri forests based on data collected from 2012 to 2018. Forest land area remained stable at 15.4 million acres, and 80 percent of forest land is in the oak/hickory forest-type group. Forests in the State continue to mature with 64 percent in large diameter stands and 61 percent in stands older than 60 years of age. Live tree net volume on timberland totals 20.9 billion cubic feet, and 79 percent of that volume is in growing-stock trees. Mortality increased by 17 percent from 2013 to 2018 to 333...

Wood products research and development at the USDA Forest Service is most concentrated at the venerable Forest Products Laboratory, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Urban wood use and market development is a unique area of study done in collaboration with city, state, and private partners in metropolitan areas across the United States. Urban trees are not removed for their wood value, but rather due to storm damage, safety, insects and disease, or other reasons. Yet, how the tree is removed impacts future options and potential value of the wood.

We work in places of incredible diversity - of people and landscapes. Embracing this diversity in all its forms helps us to enhance the reach and relevance of our public programs and improve our management practices. How can municipal arborists and urban foresters meaningfully connect with and be informed by different ways of seeing, knowing, thinking, valuing, and approaching the work of caring for our urban and community forests? This article spotlights principles and pathways for successful community engagement, organizing, and two-way learning discovered through our research, and...

Privately-owned forests provide important environmental, economic, and cultural benefits to the general public. Resulting impacts from landownership changes and conversion of working forests to other land uses threaten these benefits. The USDA Forest Service Forest Legacy Program (FLP) permanently protects threatened private forests that are of environmental, cultural, and economic importance to the greater public while keeping land ownership and forest management at the private or local level. FLP provides grants to state agencies to purchase conservation easements on private forestlands...

The hemlock woolly adelgid (Hemiptera: Adelgidae Adelges tsugaeAnnand) poses a serious threat to hemlocks in eastern North America, and ongoing research is focused on the identification and development of biological controls to protect and manage hemlock resources. Three predators native to the Pacific Northwest of North America that have been the focus of much research are Leucopis argenticollis(Zetterstedt), Leucopis piniperda(Malloch) (Diptera: Chamaemyiidae), and Laricobius nigrinus(Fender) (Coleoptera: Derodontidae). This study addresses the knowledge gap of adult Leucopisspp....

Resource selection is a key component in understanding the ecological processes underlying population dynamics, particularly for species such as northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus), which are declining across their range in North America. There is a growing body of literature quantifying breeding season resource selection in bobwhite; however, winter information is particularly sparse despite it being a season of substantial mortality. Information regarding winter resource selection is necessary to quantify the extent to which resource requirements are driving population change. We...

Old-growth forests serve as critical habitat for many sensitive species, but management practices have diminished their prevalence, and former regions of old-growth are now dominated by second-growth stands lacking the structural heterogeneity, diversity, and species richness that these older forests possess. In western Washington state in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, the Olympic Habitat Development Study was designed to address this issue and hasten the development of specific old-growth features in second-growth stands using variable-density thinning. One concern with such...

This chapter considers social vulnerability to climate change by assessing the effects of climate change on outdoor recreation in the Sierra Nevada bioregion (Fischer et al. 2013) (fig. 5.1), and providing the information needed to manage for risk and to minimize loss (Aplet et al. 2010). By considering current and projected effects, we hope to better equip land managers and stakeholders with information that can aid management and planning for socioecological resilience. The report expands the emphasis on recreation provided in a recent science synthesis for the Sierra Nevada (Long et al....