Treesearch

Accurate measurement of total fine root decomposition (the amount of dead fine roots decomposed per unit soil volume) is essential for constructing a soil carbon budget. However, the ingrowth/soil core-based models are dependent on the assumptions that fine roots in litterbags/intact cores have the same relative decomposition rate as those in intact soils and that fine root growth and death rates remain constant over time, while minirhizotrons cannot quantify the total fine root decomposition. To improve the accuracy of estimates for total fine root decomposition, we propose a new method...

Each year, wildlife biologists deploy thousands of echolocation detectors to monitor bat activity and find out what species are present at a site. But pulling these results together in a single place could help us learn more about broader scale patterns of bat activity and their seasonal movements. A new tool, the Bat Acoustic Monitoring Visualization Tool (https://visualize.batamp.databasin.org/), helps to do just that. Since its inception in 2013, users have contributed over 200,000 nights of detector data to BatAMP resulting in an unprecedented collection of results that allows users to...

In the southeastern United States, coastal communities face challenges for water resources and wastewater treatment capacity. In North Carolina, 51 municipalities irrigate forests with municipal wastewater to absorb nutrients, reduce direct effluent discharge to surface waters, and recharge groundwater. Most facilities have landapplied wastewater for decades, but there are no quantitative studies on the hydrologic impacts of this practice. This study developed a simulated water balance for the largest forest land-application system in North Carolina which treats wastewater daily by...

Although present United States (U.S.) policy restricts very nearly all Cuban commercial exports to the U.S., there is potential for the restrictions to be relaxed or perhaps even lifted at some point in the future. In light of the potential increased trade with Cuba, the potential arrival of invasive species such as bark beetles and ambrosia beetles—particularly from Asia via Cuban imports—could represent a serious threat for the southern U.S. forestlands. We develop a bioeconomic model that estimates potential economic damages to southern pine forests caused by the hypothetical introductio...

The possible effects of climate change on species interactions remain a very complex and challenging subject in community ecology. Here, we comparatively examine the interactions between maize (Zea mays) and an endophytic fungal entomopathogen (Beauveria bassiana) in a typical agroecosystem under both ambient and elevated air temperatures. We found that under ambient temperature certain key biological characteristics in maize (i.e., height, relative growth rate, biomass, and defense enzymes) and B. bassiana (i.e., conidia yield, germination rate of conidia, and virulence) were positively...

Few studies have focused on the relationships between vegetation and soil seed banks on small islands. To better understand the pattern and regeneration potential of seed banks on tropical coral islands, we measured environmental factors and the species composition, and species richness of soil seed banks and vegetation along a gradient from the center to the edges on East Island in the South China Sea. The results showed that the similarity between the species composition of vegetation and seed banks increased from the center to the edge. In the center, species richness in both vegetation...

How urbanization-associated land use/land cover change (LULCC) affects the ecohydrological cycle through altering evapotranspiration (ET) processes is not clear for rice paddy dominated watersheds. The purpose of this study was to understand long-term (2000–2013) spatial and temporal variations of ET over the Qinhuai River Basin in a humid region, southern China. We revised the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) by incorporating new algorithms describing hydrological processes of rice paddies. Using the improved SWAT model driven by remote sensing-derived LULCC and local climatic data,...

Wetlands store large carbon (C) stocks and play important roles in biogeochemical C cycling. However, the effects of environmental and anthropogenic pressures on C dynamics in lower coastal plain forested wetlands in the southern U.S. are not well understood. We established four eddy flux stations in two post-harvest and newlyplanted loblolly pine plantations (YP2–6, 2–6 yrs old; YP2–8, 2–8 yrs old), a rotation-aged loblolly pine plantations (MP, 15–27 yrs old), and a mixed bottomland hardwood forest (BHF, >100 yrs old) in the lower coastal plain of North Carolina, USA. We analyzed the...

Urban vegetations are widely used as one of the mitigation approaches to combat the public health threat from air particulate matter (PM) pollution for urban residents. However, vegetation effect at the points of interest (e.g. leeward wall, windward wall, pedestrian-level) in street-canyon from different vegetation configurations on the air quality is still not well established.We, therefore, used the numerical simulation approach to evaluate vegetation effect (VE) for different vegetation configurations (VCs) (e.g. tree or tree-shrub plantings in two sides and either side of windward or...