Treesearch

This resource update is a brief look at some of the basicmetrics that describe the status of and changes to forestresources in Alabama. This information is based on field datacollected using the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventoryand Analysis (FIA) annualized sample design, and it isupdated yearly. The application that produced this resource update was developed using data from the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis database (FIADB): https://apps.fs.usda.gov/fia/datamart/datamart_excel.html . Tables for Alabama, 2019 can be found here: https://doi.org/10.2737/FS-RU-252-Table...

Worldwide, freshwater ecosystems are threatened by invasive species, resulting in adverse effects on infrastructure, economy, recreation, and native aquatic communities. In stream settings, chemical piscicides can be an effective tool for eradicating invasive fishes. However, chemical treatments are expensive and time consuming, and they do not discriminate between invasive and native species in a system. Therefore, managers would ideally limit treatment to only the area occupied by the invasive species. Because traditional survey methods may not accurately detect individuals in low...

The top priority of fire management agencies in Canada is to protect human life and property. Here we investigate if decades of aggressive fire suppression in the boreal biome of Canada has reduced the proportion of recently burned forests near human communities, and thereby inadvertently increased the risk of wildfire. We measured the percentage of RBF, which are usually less flammable than older forests, up to a 25-km radius around communities compared to that in the surrounding regional fire regime zone. Our analysis of 160 communities across boreal Canada shows that 54.4% exhibited a...

Although biocultural stewardship models have been written about widely, especially in Indigenous and rural communities, the practice of applying them in multicultural, urban environments has rarely been explored. We have yet to realize the full potential of kinship-linked, place-based stewardship models in highly diverse and densely populated urban settings. Here we explore how the concept of biocultural stewardship can be applied to a cosmopolitan, urban setting. To do this, we draw upon our experiences as participants and leaders in collaborative projects in New York and Hawaiʻi to...

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is a type of mass timber panel used in floor, wall, and roof assemblies. An important consideration in design and construction of timber buildings is moisture durability. This study characterized the hygrothermal performance of CLT panels with laboratory measurements at multiple scales, field measurements, and modeling. The CLT panels consisted of five layers, four with spruce-pine-fir lumber and one with Douglas-fir lumber. Laboratory characterization involved measurements on small specimens that included material from only one or two layers and large specimens...

The US housing construction market consumes vast amounts of resources, with most structural elements derived from wood, a renewable and sustainable resource. The same cannot be said for all nonresidential or high-rise buildings, which are primarily made of concrete and steel. As part of continuous environmental improvement processes, building life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful tool to compare the environmental footprint of building structures. This study is a comparative LCA of an 8360-m2, 12-story mixed-use apartment/office building designed for Portland, OR, and constructed from...

The considerable economic value and recent rapid and range-wide decline of shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata) have increased interest in this species for tree improvement work. The USDA Forest Service has studied the genetics and improvement of shortleaf pine since at least the 1950s. For instance, the cooperative Southwide Southern Pine Seed Source Study included shortleaf amongst other major southern pines in a comparison of the performance of different geographic sources. In the 1960s, a formal tree improvement effort used breeding material from 50 superior trees from 12 geographic...

We integrated a widely used forest growth and management model, the Forest Vegetation Simulator, with the FSim large wildfire simulator to study how management policies affected future wildfire over 50 years on a 1.3 million ha study area comprised of a US national forest and adjacent lands. The model leverages decades of research and development on the respective forest growth and wildfire simulation models, and their integration creates a strategic forest landscape model that has a high degree of transparency in the existing user communities. The study area has been targeted for forest...

Invasive forest insects can induce tree mortality in two ways: (a) by directly harming trees; or (b) by influencing forest owners to pre-emptively harvest threatened trees. This study investigates forest owners’ intentions to harvest trees threatened by invasive insects. Our first objective is to identify and characterize agent functional types (AFTs) of family forest owners in the northeastern United States using a set of contingent behaviour questions contained in a mail survey. We establish AFTs as a form of dimension reduction, effectively casting landowners into a typology in which...

A study of commercial timber-harvesting sites in Arizona and New Mexico was conducted from 2012 to 2017 to estimate growing-stock removals, characterize current tree utilization and logging operations, and assist with estimating the amount of woody biomass left on-site after harvesting. Fifty-four sample logging sites were selected within major geographic regions proportional to regional five-year timber harvests. A two-stage sampling method was used to compute State-level utilization factors from 1,358 felled trees. Results indicated that in Arizona, for every 1,000 cubic feet (CF)...