Treesearch

The Special Issue “Decision Support to Address Multiple Ecosystem Services in Forest Management Planning” includes nine research papers, two review papers, and a white paper presenting highlights of focused research initiatives. The papers provide a comprehensive framework for the analysis and review of advanced Decision Support Systems (DSS), which are multi-criteria decision approaches. Their emphasis is on how these methods and tools may contribute to address the multi-functionality of forests, to support scenario and trade-off analysis of ecosystem services, and to represent interests...

Mountains are global biodiversity hotspots where cold environments and their associated ecological communities are threatened by climate warming. Considerable research attention has been devoted to understanding the ecological effects of alpine glacier and snowfield recession. However, much less attention has been given to identifying climate refugia in mountain ecosystems where present‐day environmental conditions will be maintained, at least in the near‐term, as other habitats change. Around the world, montane communities of microbes, animals, and plants live on, adjacent to, and...

The Great Plains, here encompassing the States of Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming (Fig. A5.1), is a diverse landscape consisting of a complex matrix of native, seminative, and nonnative grasslands intermixed with riparian and prairie woodlands, shrublands, forests, and intensively cultivated agricultural lands. The composition and abundance of the native vegetation is strongly correlated with a north-south temperature gradient and an east-west precipitation gradient. Increasing pressure for intensive urban, agricultural, and energy...

The Northeast region is heavily forested with a high diversity of hardwood and conifer forest tree species. Northern hardwoods, including sugar maple (Acer saccharum), American beech (Fagus grandifolia), yellow (Betula alleghaniensis) and paper birch (B. papyrifera), and aspen (Populus tremuloides) make up 44% of the forests, followed by the oak-hickory (Quercus-Carya) type (27%), pine (Pinus) types (white-red-jack pine (P. strobus-P. resinosus-P. banksiana), loblolly-shortleaf pine (P. taeda-P. echinata), and oak-pine) (12%), spruce-fr (Picea-Abies) type (11%), and bottomland types...

Wide climatic variations characterize the Southeastern United States (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia) and Caribbean (Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) region, including tropical, subtropical, warm-temperate, and temperate environments, as well as diverse ecosystems from coastal wetlands and dunes to piedmont savannahs and montane forests (Fig. A8.1). More than 85% of the forest land in the continental Southeast is privately owned, with the region experiencing rapid populatio...

Human activities that fragment fish habitat have isolated inland salmonid populations. This isolation is associated with loss of migratory life histories and declines in population density and abundance. Isolated populations exhibiting only resident life histories may be more likely to persist if individuals can increase lifetime reproductive success by maturing at smaller sizes or earlier ages. Therefore, accurate estimates of age and size at maturity across resident salmonid populations would improve estimates of population viability. Commonly used methods for assessing maturity such as...

In recent years, outbreaks of nonnative invasive insects and pathogens have caused significant levels of tree mortality and disturbance in various forest ecosystems throughout the United States. Laurel wilt, caused by the pathogen Raffaelea lauricola (T.C. Harr., Fraedrich and Aghayeva) and the primary vector, the redbay ambrosia beetle (Xyleborus glabratus Eichhoff), is a nonnative pest-disease complex first reported in the southeastern United States in 2002. Since then, it has spread across eleven southeastern states to date, killing hundreds of millions of trees in the plant family...

The root cause of the biological invasion problem is globalization, which has facilitated the planet-wide breakdown of biogeographic barriers to species migration (Mooney and Hobbs 2000). In order to understand and manage the problem, coordination on a global scale is essential, and international cooperation among affected countries as well as with countries of pest origin must therefore play a critical role in virtually all aspects of research on biological invasions (Chornesky et al. 2005; McNeely et al. 2001; Perrings et al. 2010; Wingfield et al. 2015). Here we discuss key aspects of...

While the subset of introduced species that become invasive is small, the damages caused by that subset and the costs of controlling them can be substantial. This chapter takes an in-depth look at the economic damages non-native species cause, methods economists often use to measure those damages, and tools used to assess invasive species policies. Ecological damages are covered in other chapters of this book. To put the problem in perspective, Federal agencies reported spending more than half a billion dollars per year in 1999 and 2000 for activities related to invasive species ($513.9...