Treesearch

Artificial forests in China and worldwide are mainly composed of homogeneous monocultures. While this design is often suitable for commercial plantations, many of these forests were initially established for environmental purposes. To better support biodiversity and ecosystem health, we advocate for the rewilding of China’s non-commercial artificial forests to meet the restoration goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Body size is often strongly linked to species abundance and range size. Although Bergman's rule, which relates body size to climate, has been extensively studied, the implications of this rule for conservation remain unclear. Climate warming may reduce the habitat area of some large‐bodied species at higher latitudes or altitudes, where they need large ranges to survive, and may also cause some larger‐bodied species to shrink, as there is no critical need for them to remain large in order to preserve heat in very cold conditions. Under such circumstances, Bergmann's rule may offer some...

Vascular plants are a fundamental component of urban green spaces (UGSs) and their diversity determines the associated ecological benefits. This study surveys the vascular plant diversity in three types of UGSs (i.e., urban parks, residential green spaces, and street green spaces) in Guangzhou, Southern China. The distribution patterns of vascular plant diversity in UGSs were analyzed from multiple perspectives, such as native‐exotic species, urbanization degree (urban‐rural gradient). We recorded a total of 207 vascular plant species belonging to 172 genera and 83 families, accounting for...

Body size is among the key subjects in macroecology and macroevolution with important implications for conservation. Two major rules have been proposed to explain how body size changes over evolutionary time (Cope's rule) and across temperature gradients (Bergmann's rule). To date, however, the applicability of both rules to global terrestrial vertebrates (tetrapod) remains elusive. Here, using the newly available data, we comparatively examined the temporal variation in species body size of the world's extant tetrapod species (tetrapoda as a whole) and of each class, amphibians (Amphibia),...

Rising visitation to the Cleveland National Forest (CNF) has led the Forest Service to adopt the 2022 San Diego River Watershed Visitor Use Management Plan to balance recreation, resource protection, and visitor safety. High-use sites such as Three Sisters Falls and Cedar Creek Falls are priorities due to their urban proximity, wildfire potential, limited parking, quantity of Search and Rescue efforts, and status as two of the only accessible waterfalls in the county. Challenges include safety, crowding, and ecological impacts. Current strategies involve education, infrastructure, permits,...

Ecological community data are used to infer levels of environmental stressors; for example, epiphytic lichen communities can be used to estimate levels of air pollutants. If stressors are so severe that the community of interest disappears altogether, then “empty” plots are recorded. The problem compounds when multiple environmental stressors strongly influence the community. We explore this problem using simulated data and a case study of epiphytic lichens in the Sierra Nevada mountains of the United States. This area experiences relatively high amounts of nitrogen (N) deposition that can...

Animal migration remains poorly understood for many organisms, impeding understanding of movement dynamics and limiting conservation actions. We develop a framework that scales from movements of individuals to the dynamics of continental migration using data synthesis of endogenous markers, which we apply to three North American bat species with unexplained high rates of fatalities at wind energy facilities. The two species experiencing the highest fatality rates exhibit a “pell‐mell” migration strategy in which individuals move from summer habitats in multiple directions, both to higher...

The wood-boring cerambycid Anoplophora glabripennis (Motschulsky), Asian longhorned beetle, is a highly destructive invasive pest that feeds on healthy hardwoods by tunneling under the bark and then within the sapwood as larvae mature. Larval weight gain and survival can be affected by the nutritional content, moisture content, and physical traits of the available food source. In this study, we experimentally manipulated the larval resource quality by controlling the moisture content of artificial diet (70% and 40% moisture) and by inserting larvae into cut wood of 2 different hosts (sugar...

Increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations fuel global warming, with boreal regions warming at a faster rate than many other areas. Boreal forests are an important component of the global carbon cycle, yet we have little data on photosynthetic responses of boreal trees to elevated CO2 (EC) and warming. We grew seedlings of 5 widespread North American boreal tree species (from Betula, Larix, Picea, and Pinus) under current (410 ppm) or elevated (750 ppm) CO2 and either ambient (+0 °C) or increased (+4 °C or +8 °C) temperature, then measured photosynthetic traits over a range of leaf temperatu...

Background: Conventional volunteer pools can generate labor for citizen science activities, but opportunities also exist to involve and incorporate student populations into meaningful data collection exercises and service learning initiatives. This is especially relevant in urban and community forestry, where land managers are charged with maintaining inventory records of tree populations in order to inform management and policy decisions but often operate without adequate capacity to maintain high quality and updated data. Previous research has shown that trained undergraduate students...