Treesearch

The role of non-wood forest products (NWFPs) in industrialised country economies has declined in the past, but they are generating renewed interest as business opportunities. In a forest-based bio-economy frame, NWFPs can contribute to human nutrition, renewable materials, and cultural and experiential services, as well as create job and income opportunities in rural areas. Applying a service-dominant logic (SDL) approach to analysis of NWFPs, this article aimed to understand how new goods and services are co-created through networks of public and private actors in specific institutional,...

Many animals make contingent decisions, such as when and where to feed, as trade-offs between growth and risk when these vary not only with activity and location but also 1) in cycles such as the daily light cycle and 2) with feedbacks due to competition. Theory can assume an individual decides whether and where to feed, at any point in the light cycle and under any new conditions, by predicting future conditions and maximizing an approximate measure of future fitness. We develop four such theories for stream trout and evaluate them by their ability to reproduce, in an individual-based...

Hibiscus hamabo Sieb.et Zucc, a deciduous shrub or tree, is an important semi-mangrove plant with golden yellow flowers. The plant is also cultivated for its fiber and grown as an ornamental. It is halophytic and considered one of the best afforestation trees used in reclamation programs in urban and coastal areas high in salt content. However, very little work has been done on its genetics; therefore, this study was undertaken to determine the genome size, the chromosome numbers, and rDNA (18S rDNA and 5S rDNA) loci in H. hamabo using flow cytometry, protoplast spread technique, and...

Throughout the United States, many institutions of higher education own forested tracts, often called school forests, which they use for teaching, research, and demonstration purposes. These school forests provide a range of benefits to the communities in which they are located. However, because administration is often decoupled from research and teaching, those benefits might not always be evident to the individuals who make decisions about the management and use of school forests, which may undervalue their services and put these areas at risk for sale, development, or over-harvesting to...

To evaluate the reliability of lumber structures, we need (among many other things) good models for the strength and stiffness distributions of visual and machine-stressrated (MSR) grades of lumber. Verrill et al. established theoretically and empirically that the strength properties of visual and MSR grades of lumber are not distributed as twoparameter Weibulls. Instead, strength properties of grades of lumber must have (at least to a first approximation) “pseudo-truncated” distributions. To properly implement Verrill et al.’s pseudo-truncation theory, we must know the true mill run...

A multiyear study of forest-to-alpine ecotones across extensive krummholz zones in whitebark pine (WBP; Pinus albicaulis), Sierra Nevada, California, resolved mean treeline growing season temperature (GST) of 9.3°C, 2.6°C warmer than global thresholds previously described, and mean growing season length of 143 days. Temperatures declined with increasing elevation; GST at the upper krummholz line (8.9°C), however, was 2.2°C warmer than the mean global treeline threshold, suggesting that by thermal criteria these environments should support tree growth. Possible explanations for the warm...

Sometimes the exceptions prove the rule, and lianas show some of the most exceptional stem anatomical variation in plants. New research describes the evolution and development of liana stem anatomical variants, and reveals new rules of woody growth.

In present work, Fe-lignin composites were prepared by chemical coprecipitation of metal salts and kraft lignin; the thermal stability of the Fe-lignin mixture was then investigated at temperatures up to 300 °C using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and diferential scanning calorimetry (DSC) at a heating rate of 5 °C min−1 under nitrogen atmosphere. The structural characteristics of Fe-lignin thermal treated under diferent temperatures were identifed by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometry. The temperature-programmed thermal decomposition (TPD) of Fe-lignin samples was carried...

Low-cost flexible microwave circuits with compact size and light weight are highly desirable for flexible wireless communication and other miniaturized microwave systems. However, the prevalent studies on flexible microwave electronics have only focused on individual flexible microwave elements such as transistors, inductors, capacitors, and transmission lines. Thinning down supporting substrate of rigid chip-based monolithic microwave integrated circuits has been the only approach toward flexible microwave integrated circuits. Here, we report a flexible microwave integrated circuit...