Treesearch

The balance between methane producing and methane consuming microorganisms is partially responsible for the magnitude and direction of soil-atmosphere methane fluxes. Therefore, understanding the effects of vegetation and land use on relative abundance, community structure and vertical distribution of methane cycling microorganisms should help us interpret patterns of net emissions of methane. Mountain peatlands in the tropics areabundant and are important in global carbon cycling, but little is known about the communities of methane cycling microorganisms in these ecosystems. We sampled...

Accurately monitoring forest canopy height is crucial for sustainable forest management, particularly in southeastern North Carolina, USA, where dense forests and limited accessibility pose substantial challenges. This study presents an explainable machine learning framework that integrates sparse GEDI LiDAR samples with multi-sensor remote sensing data to improve both the accuracy and interpretability of forest canopy height estimation. This framework incorporates multitemporal optical observations from Sentinel-2; C-band backscatter and InSAR coherence from Sentinel-1; quad-polarization...

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), specifically U-Nets, successfully detect and segment individual tree crowns when applied to high spatial resolution remotely sensed data. However, much of the prior work for individual tree detection and segmentation has been in arid climates such as the western United States and the African Sahel. In this study, we used the U-Net-id CNN architecture and National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery to investigate forest-cover-specific training on individual tree crown detection in Virginia, U.S. We trained three models using hand-delineated...

Previous research shows that forest preservation can protect water quality, but it is less clear what the net economic costs of forest preservation might be for drinking water utilities. Economic valuation of forest benefits for drinking water is complex in part because the potential economic benefit is indirectly related to forest preservation through the benefit of forests for water quality. We contribute to a growing literature on land use water quality interactions by linking ecological production and economic valuation functions that relate to changes in forest cover and water...

Estimating the biomass of terrestrial forests generally, and mangrove forests in particular, is an area of considerable interest. Most approaches rely on empirically derived allometric models to predict tree biomass. The single parameter with the strongest predictive ability in most studies is diameter at breast height (DBH); however the use of DBH arose primarily out of convenience, not from an analysis of tree form. While DBH explains a lot of variability in other tree metrics such as height or above ground biomass, its utility in smaller species is uncertain. Here we used measurements...

In forested, seasonally dry watersheds, winter rains commonly replenish water storage deficits in the vadose zone before recharging underlying hillslope groundwater systems that sustain streamflow. However, the relative inaccessibility of the subsurface limits our understanding of how groundwater recharge is moderated by vadose zone storage deficits generated by plant-water uptake. Here, we compare groundwater recharge inferred from the storage-discharge relationship with independent, distributed estimates of deficits across 12 undisturbed California watersheds. We find accrued dry season...

Translocations are the intentional movement of animals across landscapes for conservation purposes and are used as a common method for restoring populations. Fisher (Pekania pennanti) populations have been extensively reintroduced and augmented in the Western United States, often using multiple source populations. To date, little is known about the success of past translocation efforts for Fisher recovery in the West, nor what the effects of using distinct populations for translocations were on contemporary population composition and genetic diversity. To understand the effects of historic...

Wild foods are critical to the food security of billions of people worldwide, yet the ecological mechanisms that promote wild food system stability remain poorly understood. Within complex food webs, ecological theory predicts that nonhuman consumers can maintain more stable consumption rates by foraging on multiple resources that vary asynchronously in their availability across space and time. These so-called portfolio effects may also sustain more stable harvest rates by humans in wild food systems. We analyzed wild food harvest patterns for 46 isolated rural communities in southern...

In 2023, a new generation of National Land Cover Database (NLCD) Tree Canopy Cover (TCC) data were produced that include annual 30m gridded time-series products for the Conterminous United States (CONUS). These NLCD TCC v2021.4 products have more frequent time steps, inter-annual coherency, lower product release latency, improved accuracy, uncertainty metrics, and documentation over previous versions. Our methodology leveraged Google Earth Engine (GEE) to generate annual time-series composites from Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery that were used to predict annual pixel-wise TCC. Next, we...

Structural insulated panel foams are made primarily from petrochemicals. As a biopolymer, lignin is a promising raw material substitute for foam production. Nondestructive evaluation is routinely used for structural material strength and stiffness assessment. Herein, mechanical acoustic velocity (AV) was used to nondestructively evaluate lignin-foam blocks. Overall, foam block weight was determined, and flying time was measured for various foam thicknesses ranging from 7.26 to 8.89 cm (3.0 to 3.5 in.). Additionally, for each block, AV was measured at several different positions/locations....