Treesearch

Forest ecosystems provide essential services such as timber, water regulation, biodiversity, and recreation, yet they are increasingly influenced by the interplay between climate and socioeconomic forces. This study synthesizes findings from the 2020 Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment to evaluate how these factors affect historical trends and future projections of U.S. forest conditions and services. Results show that total forest area is projected to decline slightly by 2070, mainly due to conversion to developed land, with the greatest losses occurring in the South. While socioeconom...

Restoration of dry forest landscapes of the Pacific Northwest often involves the removal of some closed-canopy forest that has expanded due to fire exclusion, but this can conflict with species conservation when species require closed-canopy forest as part of their habitat. Fire refugia—areas within fire perimeters that burn less severely or frequently—might provide a solution to this conflict. We used a species-specific approach to understanding fire refugia for northern spotted owls to model the post-fire persistence of nesting and roosting (NR) forest in the frequent fire landscapes of...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in New Hampshire. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining...

As wildfires in the western US grow in both size and intensity, forest policymakers and managers seek effective ways to mitigate and adapt to increasing wildfire risk. In some regions, such as the western Pacific Northwest, where wildfires historically burned infrequently, climate change and housing development appear to be altering wildfire regimes while bringing greater numbers of people living in greater proximity to potentially more fire-prone forests. Developing effective strategies for family forest owners to adapt to the wildfire regimes of the future will depend on designing...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides this resource update yearly as an overview of forest resources in Pennsylvania. These estimates are derived from field data collected across a systematic network of fixed-radius forest monitoring plots located on both public and private land. New updates are provided annually as a subset of plots within the State are remeasured. Each year, field crews visit and measure a subset of all FIA plots across the entire State (the size of the subset varies by State and year). Combining...

The National Woodland Owner Survey (NWOS) was developed in part to understand why private landowners—individuals, families, corporations, and other organizations – own forest land and what benefits and value that land provides. From the NWOS, we know that family forests provide many elements that forestry experts have traditionally emphasized—products such as wood and non-timber forest products and services such as recreation. However, the NWOS has also highlighted that these are not the primary ownership objectives for many family forest owners (FFOs), with other objectives such as...

Methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas, and tropical forests account for roughly one–third of global atmospheric CH4 uptake by soils. Projected warming and more frequent hurricanes in these ecosystems may alter soil CH4 sink strength, as warmer and wetter soils enhance methanogenesis activity. We measured soil CH4 and CO2 efflux during the calendar summer months of 2023 and 2024 alongside continuous records of soil moisture, soil and air temperature, and precipitation in an in–situ warming experiment (TRACE) located in a lowland tropical forest in Puerto Rico, six to seven years after...

Understanding how plant functional traits mediate ecosystem resilience to extreme events is central to predicting ecological responses under variable climates. We asked: does edaphic filtering in serpentine versus volcanic soils shape plant functional composition in ways that determine forest stability (resistance, resilience, temporal stability, and recovery) following a major hurricane (Hurricane Maria)? We hypothesized that stress‐tolerant serpentine plant communities would be more resistant but recover less quickly from environmental disturbances, while volcanic plant communities would...

Optimizing soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration in pasture systems requires understanding the carbon storage capacity across the entire soil profile. Though SOC concentrations typically decline with depth, the large volume of subsurface soil means it can constitute more than half of the total SOC pool. Therefore, it is important to consider deeper soil layers beyond those typically sampled (i.e., 0–30 cm). Here, we quantified the SOC stocks to 1 m on 12 Vermont (USA) pastures. This SOC stock averaged 12.9 kg C m −2 (range 8.8–19.2), which is consistent with both SOC storage in US...

Weather and fuels are among the critical, interacting factors that drive wildland fire behavior, and thus are primary factors in fire operations planning and decision support tools. In mesic forests, variation in stand structure may lead to heterogeneous microclimate and fuel moisture conditions in the understory where fires often ignite and spread. However, such variation in fuel availability is often overlooked by fire behavior models that assume spatially uniform weather and fuel conditions. In this study, we analyze a combination of field-based understory meteorology and fuel moisture...