Treesearch

This report provides detailed protocols for urban tree monitoring data collection. Specifically, we discuss the core variables necessary for field-based monitoring projects, including field crew identification, field crew experience level, tree record identifier, location, site type, land use, species, mortality status, crown vigor, and trunk diameter. The intent of this Field Guide is to serve urban forest managers and researchers who collect longitudinal field data on urban trees, as well as interns and citizen scientists. This report is a companion document to Urban Tree Monitoring: A...

Wildfires are landscape scale disturbances that can significantly affect hydrologic processes such as runoff generation and sediment and nutrient transport to streams. In Fall 2016, multiple large drought-related wildfires burned forests across the southern Appalachian Mountains. Immediately after the fires, we identified and instrumented eight 28.4–344 ha watersheds (four burned and four unburned) to measure vegetation, soil, water quantity, and water quality responses over the following two years. Within burned watersheds, plots varied in burn severity with up to 100% tree mortality and...

Urban forests provide a variety of ecosystem services that influence environmental and social welfare, but variable distribution of urban tree canopy (UTC) within and among urban areas can lead to inequitable provisioning of these benefits. Variation in UTC among and within urban areas is associated with local development patterns and socio-economic factors as well as broad-scale variation in the biophysical and socio-cultural context of urban regions. The objective of this study was to evaluate regional and continental trends in UTC distribution within and among urban areas, including...

Although the yard is a hybrid social and material landscape, much social science research emphasizes the socio-cultural factors and has mostly neglected the potentially important influence of plants, animals, and the nonliving material world on homeowners' decision-making. Using interviews across six metropolitan areas in the United States, we investigated the ways residential yards' nonhuman context is perceived to influence homeowners’ relationships with and planning for their yards. We found that nonhuman dynamics establish boundaries of yard-related decision-making, and that homeowners...

Subtropical China has a large area of Acacia mangium plantations; however, some key aspects of the structural and functional changes and the associated mechanisms after planting are still not well understood. We established a permanent plot in an A. mangium plantation and monitored the plant diversity (i.e., the number of species), biomass, soil physical and chemical properties and light transmittance from 1984 to 2018. Protocols for standard observation and measurement of Chinese Ecological Research Network were adopted. The total number of species in the plantation increased gradually...

Computer models used to predict forest and fuels dynamics and wildfire behavior inform decisionmaking in contexts such as postdisturbance management. It is imperative to understand possible uncertainty in model predictions. We evaluated sensitivity of the Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator predictions to parameters that determine dynamics of standing dead trees (snags) and surface woody fuels. Predicted peak coarse and fine woody fuels were not sensitive to the decomposition rate of snags but were sensitive to decomposition rate of surface fuels regardless of...

Despite statements that it can mitigate financial risk through farm diversification, alley cropping in the United States Southeast has not been comprehensively modeled to estimate potential financial returns and risks. We used a Monte Carlo method to model stochastic financial returns to monocropping agriculture, loblolly pine plantation, and loblolly pine alley cropping in North Carolina, USA, plotting the results from 25,000 iterations to understand financial risk. Under certain scenarios and assumptions, alley cropping did have financial returns comparable to, or potentially higher than...