Treesearch

A recent expansion in wood energy use at schools in Alaska has resulted in more than a dozen wood energy systems in operation. However, few have been evaluated for fuel efficiency and pollution impacts, both of which can be examined via combustion gas analysis. In this research, we monitored the wood energy system at a public school during winter heating conditions. Wood energy parameters were sampled on three occasions during early, mid, and late winter in northern Alaska. Combustion gas was sampled for a range of parameters that indicated boiler performance, including gas emmissions of...

This report highlights key findings from 2013 data collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Inventory and Analysis program across all forested land on Guam, updating findings from data collected in 2002 that were published in Resource Bulletin PNW-RB-243. We summarize and interpret basic resource information such as estimates of forest area, stem volume, biomass, number of trees, damages to trees, and tree size distribution, as well as overstory and understory vegetation cover and information on invasive plant species presence and cover. Detailed tables and...

Research increasingly shows that greening activity can spur contagious or imitative behavior among nearby neighbors within residential landscapes. Krusky et al. (2015) examined this phenomenon in the context of vacant lots and found support for a "greening hypothesis" that residential yards near vacant lots that were converted to community gardens exhibited higher levels of care than yards near untended vacant lots. Although such activity implies a temporal, causal relationship, research to date has only tested the spatial dimension of greening through correlational measures of proximity...

This paper describes data of earthworm abundance and functional group diversity regulate plant litter decay and soil organic carbon (SOC) level in global terrestrial ecosystems. The data also describes the potential effect of vegetation types, litter quality, litterbag mesh size, soil C/N, soil aggregate size, experimental types and length of experimental time on earthworm induced plant litter and SOC decay. The data were collected from 69 studies published between 1985 and 2018, covering 340 observations. This data article is related to the paper “Earthworm Abundance and Functional Group...

Cuba and Puerto Rico have much in common and have been referred to in a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tío as “…son de un pájaro las dos alas” (two wings of one bird). Throughout their histories, they have faced similar challenges in maintaining food security and ecosystem health. Global climate change now threatens both islands with parallel challenges to their similar cropping systems, forests, and producer demographics. Rising temperatures and resultant shifts in climate patterns have led to an increased occurrence of drought, punctuated by tropical storms and hurricanes of increasing...

Retaining women in forestry and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields is a challenge. University education represents a critical point along the forestry pipeline in which women might leave the profession. Concerned with the low number of women graduating with bachelor's degrees in forestry from the University of Maine's School of Forest Resources, a group of faculty and students formed Supporting Women in Forestry Today (SWIFT) in 2016. An organization guided by literature on improving gender diversity in the workplace, SWIFT has taken an adaptive and evidence-base...

High numbers of threatened species might be expected to occur where overall species richness is also high; however, this explains only a proportion of the global variation in threatened species richness. Understanding why many areas have more or fewer threatened species than would be expected given their species richness, and whether that is consistent across taxa, is essential for identifying global conservation priorities. Here, we show that, after controlling for species richness, environmental factors, such as temperature and insularity, are typically more important than human impacts...

High-elevation five-needle pine trees are a group of Pinus species in the subgenus Strobus that occur at the edges of plant growth near the alpine tree line. These species are ecologically very important and are also threatened by climate-driven insect outbreaks and an exotic pathogen. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) play central roles in the environmental adaptation of plants and in their defense against insects and pathogens. For example, the VOCs emitted by some high-elevation five-needle pine species attract female, tree-killing mountain pine beetles (MPB, Dendroctonus ponderosae) in...

Absentee landowners, or those who do not live on their forestland, own approximately 117 million acres of private forestland in the U.S. Thus, their land management decisions and activities influence the flow of forestbased goods and services. We explore the question of whether absentee family forest owners are less active land managers than resident landowners and whether membership in conservation organizations is associated with higher levels of land management activity by absentee owners. To examine these questions, we administered a mail survey to randomly-selected family forest...

Euphilotes ancilla purpura and cryptica (Lycaenidae), butterflies endemic to the Spring Mountains (Clark Co., Nevada), have been described as two univoltine, temporally isolated, sympatric taxa that utilize different early- and late-flowering larval host plant varieties (Eriogonum umbellatum). However, our results from field and laboratory indicate that this is not the case. The subspecies overlap in timing of adult reproductive flight (compilation of field records 1977 to 2018) and laboratory emergence of adults from early-season, non-diapause pupae indicate butterflies are not univoltine....