Treesearch

Across the Pacific Northwest’s fire-prone landscapes, where human activity accounts for about 58 percent of all ignitions, socioeconomic factors point to why some communities face repeated blazes and some remain untouched. These patterns raise critical questions about the allocations of wildfire resourcesAfter analyzing more than 104,000 wildfire ignitions across Oregon and Washington from 1992–2018, researchers Jeff Kline, Mindy Crandall, and Caitlyn Reilley reveal a paradox in wildfire risk management. While current risk assessment tools predict higher wildfire hazard in well-resourced...

Many non-native tree species are recognized as problematic to ecosystems they have invaded, and subsequent control efforts have met with varying levels of success. Falcataria falcatais a fast-growing, N-fixing tree that has aggressively invaded landscapes across the Hawaiian Archipelago. Due to their ability to alter Hawaiʻi’s native forest ecosystems, large stature at maturity, and potential for catastrophic tree fall, F. falcatastands pose threats to Hawaiʻi’s native forests, residential communities, and agricultural lands. We investigated responses to chemical control of F. falcatastands...

Forest production chains grounded on applicable laws and regulations are essential for achieving sustainable forestry, circular economies, and climatic mitigation. In Puerto Rico, reactivating the forestry sector as a key player capable of providing ecosystem services, raw materials, and products can signficantly contribute to these goals through the sustainable development of local wood production. However, the lack of wood processing capacity and active managementfor forest products became evident following the hurricanes Irma and María in 2017, which downed large quantities of trees....

Carbon–climate (CC) feedbacks — arising from response of land and ocean carbon sinks to elevated CO2 and climate warming — are critical yet highly uncertain drivers of Earth’s climate trajectory. Processes such as permafrost thaw, tropical forest dieback, reduced ocean uptake, and intensifying climate extremes are already weakening natural carbon sinks, with potential to amplify warming and accelerate crossing of tipping points. Detecting and quantifying these dynamics requires sustained, high-resolution, spatially-comprehensive Earth Observations. Drawing on outcomes from a 2024 community...

Tree canopy height is a key indicator of forest biomass, productivity and structure, yet measuring it accurately at regional or larger scales, whether from the ground or remotely, remains challenging. The objective of this study is to generate the first complete canopy height map of the Amazon forest at
4.78m resolution using Planet NICFI imagery and deep learning. Specifically, we (i) trained a U-Net regression model with canopy height models (CHMs) derived from tropical airborne LiDAR and their corresponding Planet NICFI images to estimate canopy height, (ii) evaluated the accuracy of...

It is unclear how plants respond to increasing temperatures. Leaf heat tolerance (LHT) is often at its upper limit in tropical forests, suggesting that climate change might negatively impact these forests. We hypothesized that intraspecific variation in LHT might be associated with changes in the soil microbiome, which might also respond to climate. We hypothesized that warming would increase LHT through changes in the soil microbiome: we combined an in situ tropical warming experiment with a shade house experiment in Puerto Rico. The shade house experiment consisted of growing seedlings...

Hurricanes strongly regulate vegetation structure and dynamics in coastal tropical forests by causing tree mortality and damaging the crowns of surviving trees. Despite the importance of this damage for long-term forest demography and carbon dynamics, the patterns and drivers of variation in hurricane-induced damage across heterogeneous landscapes remain poorly quantified. Here, we integrate field inventory data with repeated airborne LiDAR measurements to quantify tree crown damage following Hurricane María (Category 4) in the Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico. We applied two...

Improved forest management (IFM), particularly the transition of even-aged forests to continuous cover forestry (CCF), is gaining attention as a management approach that may contribute to climate change mitigation by enhancing forest carbon sequestration and maintaining soil carbon storage. CCF aims to maintain continuous tree cover over time by using selective harvesting and natural regeneration instead of clear-cutting (CC), and is promoted as a forest management method that enhances productivity, ecological, and social benefits. Using a Scots pine stand management in Poland, we evaluated...

Microbial nitrogen (N) fixation accounts for c. 97% of natural N inputs to terrestrial ecosystems. These microbes can be free-living in the soil and leaf litter (asymbiotic) or in symbiosis with plants. Warming is expected to increase N-fixation rates because warmer temperatures favor the growth and activity of N-fixing microbes.We investigated the effects of warming on asymbiotic components of N fixation at a field warming experiment in Puerto Rico. We analyzed the function and composition of bacterial communities from surface soil and leaf litter samples.Warming significantly increased...

The Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) is one of the most widely distributed heron species worldwide, absent only from Australasia and the far northern Holarctic. Notable for its pronounced phenotypic and genetic variability in plumage, the species occasionally exhibits rare chromatic aberrations such as melanism, leucism and albinism. These phenomena provide valuable insights into adaptability, underlying genetic mechanisms and ecological and evolutionary implications. Here, we summarize the frequency and geographic distribution of documented plumage aberrations of the...