Treesearch

Forestry and natural resource professionals are increasingly looking for information on the anticipated effects of climate change on ecosystems, as well as management options for responding to these changes. The field of climate change adaptation has been growing rapidly in the past decade, with multiple organizations providing scientific and technical resources to help advance climate-informed practices across the northeastern United States and beyond. However, the inability to know exactly what will happen in the future can create a significant barrier to incorporating new information...

Foresters face increasing challenges in implementing sound, long-term management actions due to the increasing impacts of climate change in combination with other ecosystem stressors. The amount of information about climate change and forests is growing rapidly, but it can be difficult to keep up with new, complex information and incorporate it into management plans and activities. Fortunately, there are resources available to help fo resters consider how climate change will affect their client's forests and address options for adapting forests to enhance resilience as conditions change.

The spatial pattern of surface fuelbeds in fire-dependent ecosystems are rarely captured using long-standing fuel sampling methods. New techniques, both field sampling and remote sensing, that capture vegetation fuel type, biomass, and volume at super fine-scales (cm to dm) in three-dimensions (3D) are critical to advancing forest fuel and wildland fire science. Such scales are particularly important for some computational fluid dynamics fire behavior models that operate in 3D and have implications for wildland fire operations and fire effects research. This study describes the coupling of...

In recent decades, a paradigm shift in forest management and associated policies has led to greater emphasis on harvest practices that retain mature, overstory trees in forest stands that would otherwise be clear-cut. While it is often assumed that the maintenance of compositional and structural complexity, such as that achieved through retention forestry approaches, will also mitigate negative impacts to functional diversity, empirical evidence of this relationship is sparse. We examined the effects of an aggregated retention system on taxonomic and functional diversity in a regenerating...

Cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) suspensions were compounded into blends of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) and poly(vinyl acetate) (PVAc) using a novel wet compounding approach in which drying and compounding were carried out simultaneously. The resulting CNC/PLA composites were compared with those produced using a more traditional method of freeze-drying CNC suspensions followed by melt-blending into PLA. CNCs in wet compounded composites appeared to be well-dispersed in the PLA/PVAc blends, and films extruded from these compounds exhibited high transparency compared with melt-blended composites. Gel...

Hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), Adelges tsugae Annand (Hemiptera: Adelgidae), is an invasive pest causing significant mortality to eastern and Carolina hemlock in eastern North America. Since 2003, management of HWA has included targeted release of the HWA predator Laricobius nigrinus Fender (Coleoptera: Derodontidae), native to western North America. Establishment of L. nigrinus at release sites is well documented, but investigations of its impact on HWA populations have been limited. A four-year (2014–2018), two-phase study using predator exclusion cages to assess the impactof L. nigrinus...

Hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), Adelge stsugae Annand (Hemiptera: Adelgidae), has devastated eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis [L.] Carriere) in a major portion of its native range in eastern North America. Population dynamics of HWA in the absence of predators have been studied for decades. After many years and much effort directed towards rearing and releasing biological control agents to manage HWA, one of the seagents, Laricobius nigrinus Fender (Coleoptera: Derodontidae), is now successfully established at significant densities at sites from the southern to the mid-Atlantic states of...

From October to December of 2016, a confluence of human and environmental factors led to an outbreak of wildfires across the Southern Appalachian Mountains. This report examines the time trends of fire in the Southern Appalachian region, including mitigation activities and forecasting acres burned. The introduction (ch. 1) of this report describes the 2016 Southern Appalachian fires on public lands and provides a brief description of the methodology used to understand economic impacts of fire. Chapters 2 and 3 examine how prescribed fire is used in this region. The final chapter (ch. 4)...

Humans have created an accelerating, increasingly connected, globalized economy, resulting in a more globalized, shared flora. The prevention of new, establishing species is less costly, both economically and ecologically, and is more manageable than eradicating nonnative invasive species once they are widespread and negatively impactful. We ask if international trade hubs and points-of-entry with high-volume trade, constant disturbance, and propagule rain have a higher number of nonnative species compared to surrounding areas and if they may serve as initial establishment sites and...

The spatial expansions of invasive organisms in the novel range are generally expected to follow an isolation-by-distance relationship (IBD) if the invasion is biologically driven; however, many invasions are facilitated anthropogenically. This research focused on the extant expansion patterns of cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica). Cogongrass is a widespread invasive species throughout the southern UnitedStates(US). Patterns of infestation vary among US states. Cogongrass is pyrogenic, and its invasion threatens softwood (Pinusspp.) plantations, a substantial economic market for this US...