Treesearch

It is generally assumed that forests improve ecosystem service (ES) provisioning within landscapes. These assumptions drive policies (e.g. Payment for Ecosystem Services) that affect land-use without knowing if the desired services are achieved. Here we use a data-intensive approach to explore the synergies and tradeoffs between three regulating (hydrologic regulation, water quality, carbon storage) and one supporting ES (biodiversity). Using field-based measurements for ten ES indicators collected within eight land use/land cover (LULC) types we assess: (1) the relationship between ES...

Predicting the behavior of overland flow with analytical solutions to the kinematic wave equation is appealing due to its relative ease of implementation. Such simple solutions, however, have largely been constrained to applications on simple planar hillslopes. This study presents analytical solutions to the kinematic wave equation for hillslopes with modest topographic curvature that causes divergence or convergence of runoff flowpaths. The solution averages flow depths along changing hillslope contours whose lengths vary according hillslope width function, and results in a one‐dimensional...

Recent bioacoustic advances have facilitated large‐scale population monitoring for acoustically active species. Animal sounds, however, can of information that is underutilized in typical approaches to passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) that treat sounds simply as detections. We developed 3 methods of extracting additional ecological detail from acoustic data that are applicable to a broad range of acoustically active species. We conducted landscape‐scale passive acoustic surveys of a declining owl species and an invasive congeneric competitor in California. We then used sex‐specific...

Collections of micro-organisms are a crucial element of life science research infrastructure but are vulnerable to loss and damage caused by natural or man-made disasters, the untimely death or retirement of personnel, or the loss of research funding. Preservation of biological collections has risen in priority due to a new appreciation for discoveries linked to preserved specimens, emerging hurdles to international collecting and decreased funding for new collecting. While many historic collections have been lost, several have been preserved, some with dramatic rescue stories. Rescued...

Fungi play many essential roles in ecosystems. They facilitate plant access to nutrients and water, serve as decay agents that cycle carbon and nutrients through the soil, water and atmosphere, and are major regulators of macro-organismal populations. Although technological advances are improving the detection and identification of fungi, there still exist key gaps in our ecological knowledge of this kingdom, especially related to function. Trait-based approaches have been instrumental in strengthening our understanding of plant functional ecology and, as such, provide excellent models for...

As the primary decomposers of organic material in terrestrial ecosystems, fungi are critical agents of the global carbon cycle. Yet our ability to link fungal community composition to ecosystem functioning is constrained by a limited understanding of the factors accounting for different wood decomposition rates among fungi. Here we examine which traits best explain fungal decomposition ability by combining detailed trait-based assays on 34 saprotrophic fungi from across North America in the laboratory with a 5-y field study comprising 1,582 fungi isolated from 74 decomposing logs. Fungal...

Cross laminated timber (CLT) is becoming widely available in North America. The product standard for North American CLT, PRG-320, has strict requirements on adhesive performance under fire scenarios. To become an adhesive certified under PRG-320, a full sized CLT compartment must be built and tested without a second flashover occurring caused by delamination. Currently, only three adhesive formulations are PRG-320 certified. This large scale test is expensive to run and only yields “pass-fail” results. In this paper we present small-scale adhesive tests performed at the Forest Products...

AbstractNondestructive evaluation procedures are now widely used in the forest products industry. These procedures rely upon nondestructive tests to evaluate important physical and mechanical properties of wood-based materials and began with fundamental research during and after World War II. An important outcome was the evolution of machinery and process for grading lumber and veneer. A dedicated group of scientists and engineers conducted and adapted this research for industrial use and developed equipment to make accurate measurements of wood properties in a production setting. One of...

Given the important role of climate on species distributions, climate change is expected to have effects on biodiversity conservation. Biodiversity on the Caribbean Islands is characterized by a broad range of distributions, from cosmopolitan species to many rare and endemic species that occupy limited geographic areas. Species most vulnerable to climate change include rare and endemic species in wet upper mountain cloud forests and species in restricted coastal habitats vulnerable to warming oceans and sea level rise. Tropical montane cloud forests harbor endemic and endangered species...

As heat is applied to wood, thermal degradation, called pyrolysis, occurs. A majority of what is known about the pyrolysis of wood has been obtained using either extracted component polymers or wood pyrolyzed in an inert atmosphere. However, the physical and chemical reactions that occur during pyrolysis of wood are affected by the interaction of the polymers in whole wood as well as the oxygen present in the atmosphere. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is a surface measurement technique that yields information on both the chemical composition of the sample and the chemical bonds...