Forests, Volume 10, Issue 8

Water vapor sorption is the most fundamental aspect of wood-moisture relations. It is directly or indirectly related to the physical properties of wood and the onset of wood-damage mechanisms. While sorption properties of cellulosic materials have be...

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba L.) is not only considered a ‘living fossil’, but also has important ecological, economic, and medicinal values. However, the impact of climate change on the performance and distribution of this plant is an increasin...

Egg recruitment quantifies the relative importance of realized fecundity and migration rates in the population dynamics of highly mobile insects. We develop here a formal context upon which to base the measurement and interpretation of egg recruitmen...

Urban tree growth is often affected by reduced water availability, higher temperatures, small and compacted planting pits, as well as high nutrient and pollution inputs. Despite these hindering growth conditions, recent studies found a surprisingly b...

Subtropical forests have great potential as carbon sinks; however, the relationship between net ecosystem productivity (NEP) and climate change is still unclear. This study took Zhejiang Province, a subtropical region, as an example. Based on remote...

Increased urbanization and climate change have resulted in the intensification of the urban heat island (UHI) effect, particularly in tropical cities. One of the main causes of UHI is the man-made urban surfaces influencing the radiation budget by ab...

Urban forests are often heavily populated by street trees along right-of-ways (ROW), and monitoring efforts can enhance municipal tree management. Terrestrial photogrammetric techniques have been used to measure tree biometry, but have typically used...

We present novel evidence of environmental drivers of seedling density in Abies nephrolepis, an alpine and subalpine tree species. Continuous monitoring of natural conditions is required to understand forest ecosystem dynamics. We investigated Abies ...

In recent decades, the terrestrial ecosystem in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (KPK), Pakistan, has undergone tremendous destruction. To restore environmental conditions, the government implemented the Billion Tree Afforestation Program (BTAP), with a h...

The emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire; EAB) is an invasive insect that causes mortality of trees in the genus Fraxinus, creating canopy gaps that may facilitate invasion by exotic plants. Planting native tree seedlings under EAB-infest...

Vulnerability segmentation (VS) has been widely suggested to protect stems and trunks from hydraulic failure during drought events. In many ecosystems, some species have been shown to be non-segmented (NS species). However, it is unclear whether drou...

RING-H2 genes, the most abundant RING-type genes encoding putative ubiquitin ligase E3, are involved in diverse biological processes. Whether RING-H2 genes are related to wood formation remains to be identified in trees. In this study, we identified...

We contribute to a better understanding of different remote sensing techniques for tree height estimation by comparing several techniques to both direct and indirect field measurements. From these comparisons, factors influencing the accuracy of reli...

Evidence of increased biotic disturbances in forests due to climate change is accumulating, necessitating the development of new approaches for understanding the impacts of natural disturbances on human well-being. The recent Mountain Pine Beetle (MP...

Forest health can be adversely affected by invasive organisms. Biosecurity measures to prevent the establishment of harmful invasive organisms at national points of entry (e.g., airports or shipping ports) are vital to protect forest health. Innovati...

The Returning Farmland to Forest Program (RFFP) was implemented in China in 1999 with the goal of supporting environmental restoration by returning significant areas of cultivated land to forest. While afforestation supports long-term ecosystem servi...

Understanding the occurrence patterns of forest pests is fundamental for effective forest management from both economic and ecological perspectives. Here, we review the history of the occurrence patterns and causes of outbreaks and declines of pests...

Selective logging is one of the main natural forest harvesting approaches worldwide and contributes nearly 15% of global timber needs. However, there are increasing concerns that ongoing selective logging practices have led to decreased forest produc...

Forest landscape plays a critical role in the resource management and recreational planning of forest destinations. An assessment of forest landscape quality (FLQ) could reflect the distribution of landscape resources, hence identifying the hotpots a...

This study analyzes the impact of the Indonesian government’s decentralization policy and movement on the state forest community involvement program on the island of Java from 2000 to 2014. For more than 30 years, approximately 76 percent of th...

Both leaf area (LA) and leaf angle distribution are the most important eco-physiological measures of tree crowns. However, there are limited published investigations on the two parameters of Moso bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis (Carrière) J. Houz...

Cable yarding is the most commonly used technique for harvesting timber from steep terrain in central Europe. During the planning process, one important task is to define the cable road layout. This means that the harvesting technology and cable road...

Research Highlights: Sequence phylogeny, genome organisation, gene structure, conserved motifs, promoter cis-element and expression profiling of poplar NACs related to salt stress were detected. In addition, expression of two salt-induced NACs was an...

Harvesting mountain pine beetle-infested forest stands in the northern Colorado Rocky Mountains provides an opportunity to utilize otherwise wasted resources, generate net revenues, and minimize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Timber and bioenergy pr...

Forests are part of a complex landscape mosaic and play a crucial role for people living both in rural and urbanized spaces. Recent progresses in modelling and Decision Support System (DSS) applied to the forestry sector promise to improve public par...

In this study, 145 poplar (Populus × euramericana cv.’74/76’) seedlings, a common plantation tree species in China, were selected and their ultrasonic velocities were measured at four timepoints during the first growth year. After t...

Understanding how environmental changes driven by urbanization impact the biodiversity in urban riparian areas has great importance for landscape planning and river ecosystem conservation. There have been many studies on the response of bird communit...

Knowledge on population diversity and structure is of fundamental importance for conifer breeding programs. In this study, we concentrated on the development and application of high-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers through a high-...

Whitebark pine populations are declining nearly range-wide, primarily from the exotic fungal pathogen that causes white pine blister rust (WPBR). Climate change is expected to exacerbate these declines by decreasing climatically suitable areas. Plant...

Research Highlights: We find that biochar plus fertilizer has synergistic and positive effects on seedling growth and robustness, but slightly lowers early seedling survival. Biochar plus fertilizer has the potential to greatly decrease costs associa...

The potentially large ecological, economic, and societal impacts of climate change makes it a significant problem of the 21st century. These consequences have led to tremendous development in climate change scenarios and new technologies to increase...

To promote Bio-Energy with Carbon dioxide Capture and Storage (BECCS), which aims to replace fossil fuels with bio energy and store carbon underground, and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+), which aims to reduce the...

The American quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx.) and its close relative, the Eurasian quaking aspen (Populus tremula L.), cover a realm that is perhaps the most expansive of all tree species in the world. In North America, sudden aspen decline...

Salt-affected soils in the Northern Great Plains, USA, can impact the long-term survival and growth of trees recommended for agroforestry systems, with Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia L.) being one of few options that survives on these sites. S...

Research Highlights: In this study, we classified natural forest into four forest types using time-series multi-source remotely sensed data through a proposed semi-supervised model developed and validated for mapping forest types and assessing forest...

Research Highlights: When investigating the sorption of water on lignocellulosic materials, the sorption or mixing enthalpy is an interesting parameter that, together with the sorption isotherms commonly measured, can be used to characterize and unde...

The strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of forest genetic resources, which are essential for the future adaptation of forest species to changing environments, are also a source of valuable genetic resources for breeding and restoratio...

In the context of climate change, drought is likely to become more frequent and more severe in urban areas. Urban trees are considered to play an important role in fixing carbon, improving air quality, reducing noise and providing other ecosystem ser...

The increasing frequency and severity of wildfires in semi-arid conifer forests as a result of global change pressures has raised concern over potential impacts on biodiversity. Ground-dwelling arthropod communities represent a substantial portion of...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of season of the year on the frequency and degree of damage to residual trees caused during winter and summer timber harvesting operations in young alder stands. Analyses were conducted in pure blac...

Manglietia patungensis (Magnoliaceae) exhibits radially symmetric flowers with perianth consisting of three separate sepaloid tepals in whorl 1 and six petaloid tepals in the inner two whorls, which shows an obvious difference from flowers of most Ma...

Low productivity caused by paludification in some parts of the closed black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) B.S.P) dominated boreal forest threatens the provision of ecosystem services, including wood fiber production. The accumulation, over time, of o...

Poplar (Populus × xiaohei T. S. Hwang et Liang) is an excellent model plant, with a known genome sequence, for studying woody plant developmental processes, such as seed germination. Here, we report the transcriptional profiling of poplar seeds...

Anthocyanins play many roles in plants, including providing protection from biotic and abiotic stresses. Japanese apple rust (Gymnosporangium yamadae Miyabe ex G. Yamada) causes serious diseases in plants of the genus Malus and results in reduced fru...

Whitebark pine, a foundation species at tree line in the Western U.S. and Canada, has declined due to native mountain pine beetle epidemics, wildfire, and white pine blister rust. These declines are concerning for the multitude of ecosystem and human...

The accurate estimation of leaf area is of great importance for the acquisition of information on the forest canopy structure. Currently, direct harvesting is used to obtain leaf area; however, it is difficult to quickly and effectively extract the l...

Research Highlights: This study was the first to use metabolomics techniques to investigate seed germination in poplar, a model woody plant. Our results lay a foundation for uncovering changes in metabolite levels during woody plant seed germination...

Understanding the contribution of forest ecosystems to regulating greenhouse gas emissions and maintaining the atmospheric CO₂ balance requires the accurate quantification of above-ground biomass (AGB) at the individual tree species level. The main o...

Studying how cambial age and axial height affects wood anatomical traits may improve our understanding of xylem hydraulics, heartwood formation and axial growth. Radial strips were collected from six different heights (0–11.3 m) along the main...

Improving low-efficiency artificial forests represents a popular forest hydrological issue, and exploring the optimal stand density (OSD) of low-efficiency artificial forests is an effective method for improving the soil conditions of forestland to p...