Treesearch

Throughout the Great Plains, aboveground annual net primary productivity (ANPP) is a critical ecosystem service supporting billions of dollars of commerce and countless stakeholders. Managers and producers struggle with high interannual change in ANPP, which often varies 40% between years due to fluctuating precipitation and drought. To quantify ANPP trends and evaluate interannual and spatial variation, we created the Rangeland Production Monitoring Service (RPMS), a spatially explicit database with automatic annual updates of ANPP for all rangelands in the conterminous United States. The...

The current study examined how financial scarcity and natural resource scarcity independently and interactively influence sustainable choices and motivations. Participants performed a shopping task where they chose between sustainable and conventional products, and rated their motivations for their choice. We found that financial scarcity reduced sustainable product choices, lowered pro-environmental motivations, but increased motivations to save financial costs (Experiment 1). In contrast, perceived scarcity of natural resources (i.e., water) increased sustainable choices and pro-environme...

On 14 November 2018, a symposium Managing bark and ambrosia beetles with semiochemicals was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at the Joint Meeting of the Entomological Society of America, the Entomological Society of Canada, and the Entomological Society of British Columbia. The focus was on the application of behavioural chemicals for management of bark and ambrosia beetles (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae) in conifers and hardwoods in North America and Europe. Contributors included nine invited speakers from Canada, Slovakia, and the United States of America who summarise...

Bark and ambrosia beetles and pinhole borers (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae and Platypodinae) are two subfamilies of weevils that use acoustic communication within plant tissue. Theseinsectstransmitanddetectsoundinamediumthatisneither air nor water and they are among the smallest animals with soundproducing organs. Nevertheless, their sound production is sorely understudied, mostly due to the difficulties associated with acoustically monitoring individuals inside plants. We analysed the stridulatory sounds from 55 bark and ambrosia beetle species within 15 subtribes collected in four...

Different trees may have different seed production behaviors. Understanding the spatial and temporal patterns in seed production is important for sustainable forest management. A common feature in many complex systems is burstiness in their activity patterns. Burstiness is defined here as intermittent seed production. We studied burstiness in the seed (cone) production of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) and Chinese Torreya (Torreya grandis) for the first time. Results indicated that burstiness characterized the seed production for both tree species. Burstiness ranged between low negative...

This paper draws upon Actor Network Theory (ANT) to explore material and social dynamics of a coastal community garden site on public housing grounds in Rockaway, NY after Hurricane Sandy. Through a participatory design-research project, we examine shifting associations between humans and non-humans as a way of interrogating agency, power dynamics, and governance. Acknowledging our own outsider status, we draw upon the frame of 'contact zones' for thinking through encounters in conditions of power differentials. In describing our encounter with the Beach 41st Street Community Garden as a...

Insects are essential components of forest ecosystems, representing most of the biological diversity and affecting virtually all ecological processes (Schowalter 1994). Most species are beneficial (Coulson and Witter 1984, Haack and Byler 1993), yet others periodically become so abundant that they threaten ecological, economic, social or aesthetic values at local to regional scales (tables 6.1 through 6.3). Insects influence forest ecosystem structure and function in complex and dynamic ways, for example, by regulating certain aspects of primary production; nutrient cycling; ecological...

As a signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United States has been reporting an economy-wide Inventory of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals since the mid-1990s (US EPA 2020). Forest land, harvested wood products (HWPs), and urban trees within the land sector collectively represent the largest net carbon (C) sink in the United States, offsetting more than 11 percent of total GHG emissions annually (US EPA 2020). Estimates of GHG emissions and removals are compiled by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service researchers and...

Ghana is a nation rich in natural resources and tropical diversity, with forests covering approximately one-fifth of the country’s total land area. To ensure that future generations of Ghanaians can enjoy the benefits of such a rich forest resource, Ghana has been enacting and enforcing laws intended to ensure that wood and wood-derived products are legally sourced. Compliance with and enforcement of these laws depend in part on the availability of technical or forensic expertise to validate claims of legality through the correct identification of timber during its extraction, processing,...

This file compiles Florida-specific excerpts from appendices A and B of GTR-SRS-248.