184 Results Found

Research highlights: At the turn of the 21st century, there were more forest territories found disturbed by both natural processes (climate change, wildfires, insect outbreaks, permafrost thawing, etc.) and anthropogenic interferences (air pollution,...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and digital photogrammetric techniques are two recent advances in remote sensing (RS) technology that are emerging as alternatives to high-cost airborne laser scanning (ALS) data sources. Despite the potential of UAVs...

Rising temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns under climate change scenarios are accelerating the depletion of soil moisture and increasing the risk of drought, disrupting the conditions that many plant species need to survive. This study...

Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has been used for forest biomass estimation for the past three decades. The performance of estimation, in particular, has been of great interest. However, the difference in the performance of estimation be...

In recent years, warming climate and increased fire activity have raised concern about post-fire recovery of western U.S. forests. We assessed relationships between climate variability and tree establishment after fire in dry ponderosa pine forests o...

Climate models have predicted changes in woody plant growth, vitality, and species distribution. Those changes are expected mainly within the boundaries of species ranges. We studied the influence of changing hydrothermal and burning-rate regimes on...

The growth and survival of trees in the Siberian Mountains are experiencing a strong influence on climate warming. We analyzed Siberian pine (SP, Pinus sibirica) growth within the treeline ecotone in high (>1000 m) and low (<900 m) lands. We us...

The structure and fire regime of pre-industrial (historical) dry forests over ~26 million ha of the western USA is of growing importance because wildfires are increasing and spilling over into communities. Management is guided by current conditions r...

Wildfire refugia are forest patches that are minimally-impacted by fire and provide critical habitats for fire-sensitive species and seed sources for post-fire forest regeneration. Wildfire refugia are relatively understudied, particularly concerning...

We examined spatial patterns of post-fire regenerating conifers in a Colorado, USA, dry conifer forest 11–12 years following the reintroduction of mixed-severity fire. We mapped and measured all post-fire regenerating conifers, as well as all other p...

Accurate information about ecosystem structure and biogeochemical properties is essential to providing better estimates ecosystem functioning. Airborne LiDAR (light detection and ranging) is the most accurate way to retrieve canopy structure. However...

Host utilization information is critical to managers for estimating the hosts at risk and potential geographic range for gypsy moths from different geographic origins. In this study, the development and survival of gypsy moths from all three subspeci...

The ability to automatically delineate individual tree crowns using remote sensing data opens the possibility to collect detailed tree information over large geographic regions. While individual tree crown delineation (ITCD) methods have proven succe...

Quaking aspen is found in western forests of the United States and is currently at risk of loss due to conifer competition at within-stand scales. Wildfires in these forests are impactful owing to conifer infilling during prolonged fire suppression p...

In fire-adapted conifer forests of the Western U.S., changing land use has led to increased forest densities and fuel conditions partly responsible for increasing the extent of high-severity wildfires in the region. In response, land managers often u...

The spread of exotic conifers from commercial plantation forests has significant economic and ecological implications. Accurate methods for invasive conifer detection are required to enable monitoring and guide control. In this research, we combined...

Late-1800s land surveys were used to reconstruct historical forest structure and fire over more than 235,000 ha in ponderosa pine and mixed conifer landscapes of the San Juan Mountains, Colorado, to further understand differences among regional mount...

Coatings consisting of cobalt, nickel and iron (Co-Ni-Fe) oxides were electrophoretically deposited on AISI 304-type stainless steel using aqueous suspensions without any binder. The synthesis of Co-Ni-Fe oxides was carried out by the thermal decompo...

Gymnosperms are generally regarded as poor resprouters, especially when compared to angiosperms and particularly following major disturbance. However, is it this clear-cut? This review investigates two main aspects of gymnosperm resprouting: (i) vari...

Species identification in Quebec, Canada, is usually performed with photo-interpretation at the stand level, and often results in a lack of precision which affects forest management. Very high spatial resolution imagery, such as WorldView-3 and Light...

This study examines the hydrologic response of a montane meadow the first winter following restoration by removal of encroached conifers. Hydrologic change was evaluated through statistical comparison of soil moisture and water table depths between t...

Temperate conifer forests in the Colorado Front Range are fire-adapted ecosystems where wildland fires leave a legacy in the form of char and charcoal. Long-term soil charcoal C (CC) pools result from the combined effects of wildland fires, abovegrou...

Exotic conifers can provide significant ecosystem services, but in some environments, they have become invasive and threaten indigenous ecosystems. In New Zealand, this phenomenon is of considerable concern as the area occupied by invasive exotic tre...

Air pollution constitutes a major environmental risk factor for living beings. Protection against such risk needs air pollution monitoring and control. Air pollution monitoring can be obtained in several ways. Amongst them, passive methods assessing...

As a crucial component of cemented carbide, the binder phase exerts a profound influence on its microstructure and mechanical properties. In this study, ultrafine-grained WC-10CoNiFe and WC-10Co cemented carbides, with grain sizes ranging from 0.25 t...

Grand fir (Abies grandis (Douglas ex D. Don) Lindley) is widely distributed in the moist forests of the Inland Northwest. It has high potential productivity, its growth being nearly equal to western white pine, the most productive species in the regi...

Background/objectives: Methyl jasmonate is a plant signaling molecule involved in a wide range of functions, including stress responses. This study investigates the relative differential expression of microRNAs and their target genes in response to m...

In the event of an abrupt sunlight reduction scenario, there is a time window that occurs between when food stores would likely run out for many countries (~6 months or less) and ~1 year when resilient foods are scaled up. A promising temporary resil...

Bark beetle species within the scolytid genera Dendroctonus, Ips, Pityogenes and Tomicus are known to cause extensive ecological and economical damage in spruce and pine forests during epidemic outbreaks all around the world. Dendroctonus ponderosae...

Subalpine habitats in sky islands in the Southwestern USA are currently facing large-scale transformations. Lichens have widely been used as bioindicators of environmental change. On the Colorado Plateau, fruticose lichens occur in patchy, disconnect...

The silver fir (Abies alba Mill.) is among the most valuable conifers in Europe for ecological and economic reasons. Throughout the course of history, primarily in the 20th century, its share in stands has been declining due to ill-suited management...

Research Highlights: Age structure was used to infer fire regimes in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Uneven-aged structures in stands dominated and co-dominated by pine and fir species, which are distributed according to an altitudinal gradi...

Semi-humid subtropical montane regions face the dual pressures of climate change and water scarcity, making it essential to understand how soil carbon–water coupling varies among forest types. Focusing on seven representative forest types in th...

European Black Pine (Pinus nigra J.F. Arnold) is a fast-growing conifer, currently distributed in a fragmented pattern from western North Africa through Southern Europe to Asia Minor and is an economically important native conifer in Southern Europe....

Tree-ring fire scars, tree ages, historical photographs, and historical surveys indicate that, for centuries, fire played different ecological roles across gradients of elevation, forest, and fire regimes in the Taos Valley Watersheds. Historical fir...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are non-protein coding RNAs of ~20–24 nucleotides in length that play an important role in many biological and metabolic processes, including the regulation of gene expression, plant growth and developmental processes, as wel...

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) has the largest and most northerly distribution of any white pine (Subgenus Strobus) in North America, encompassing 18° latitude and 21° longitude in western mountains. Within this broad range, however, whitebark pin...

The 2002 Hayman Fire burned with mixed-severity across a 400-ha dry conifer study site in Colorado, USA, where overstory tree and surface cover attributes had been recently measured on 20 0.1-ha permanent plots. We remeasured these plots repeatedly d...

Mapping forest extent and forest cover classification are important for the assessment of forest resources in socio-economic as well as ecological terms. Novel developments in the availability of remotely sensed data, computational resources, and adv...

The increasing demand for sustainable and clean-label foods has intensified the search for natural preservatives that are capable of replacing synthetic additives. In this study, an exploratory assessment of two distinct spruce needle aqueous extract...

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) remote sensing has demonstrated potential in measuring forest biomass. We assessed the ability of LiDAR to accurately estimate forest total above ground biomass (TAGB) on an individual stem basis in a conifer fores...

In Montenegro, coniferous forests play a key ecological role in maintaining ecosystem stability. Root-associated mycorrhizal fungi and saprotrophic fungi inhabiting forest soils are well known for their roles in nutrient cycling, organic matter decom...

Cephalotaxus oliveri is a scarce medicinal conifer endemic to the south central region of China and Vietnam. A small fragmented population presently exists due to anthropogenic disturbance. C. oliveri has been used for its alkaloids harringtonine and...

Research highlights: We investigated bioclimatic relationships between Scots pine seed mass and seed zones/climatypes across its range in Russia using extensive published data to predict seed zones and seed mass distributions in a changing climate an...

In plantation forests, competition from unwanted vegetation may reduce survival and negatively impact tree growth. The goal of this study was to examine the influence of vegetation management treatments on plant water relations and wood properties. C...

With allelopathic composts, potential merits for preventing initial weed infestations have been observed in crop transplantation. However, previous studies have rarely investigated whether high temperatures, generated during composting, decrease alle...

While deforestation is a major environmental issue in the tropics, with thousands of hectares converted to agricultural land every year, in Europe the opposite trend is observed, with land abandonment in mountainous and semi-mountainous areas allowin...

Knowledge of the forest biomass and its change in time is crucial to understanding the carbon cycle and its interactions with climate change. LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology, in this respect, has proven to be a valuable tool, providing...

Amentotaxus argotaenia (Hance) Pilg. is a threatened conifer with a wide distribution range from North to Central Vietnam due to habitat loss and over-exploitation. To provide information for its conservation and sustainable management, in the presen...

Rear-edge populations are of significant scientific interest because they can contain allelic variation not found in core-range populations. However, such populations can differ in their level of genetic diversity and divergence reflecting variation...