Understory management in forest ecosystems has been applied to improve the wood production for hundreds of years worldwide. The carbon-physiological mechanisms underlying these positive effects of understory management on the growth of overstory tree...
Long-term nitrogen (N) addition induces N saturation in forests, but its impacts on nutrient allocation across plant organs and life forms remain unclear. Utilizing a 12-year N addition experiment in a coastal poplar plantation in southeastern China,...
Retention harvesting, an approach that intentionally retains legacy features such as mature overstory trees, provides options for achieving ecological objectives. At the same time, retained overstory trees may compete with the nearby recovering under...
Research Highlights: Tree decline can alter soil carbon cycling, given the close relationship between primary production and the activity of roots and soil microbes. Background and Objectives: We studied how tree decline associated to old age and acc...
Indigenous forests cover 23.9% of New Zealand’s land area and provide highly valued ecosystem services, including climate regulation, habitat for native biota, regulation of soil erosion and recreation. Despite their importance, information on...
There is a demand for more progressive restoration directives to regenerate forest ecosystems impacted by harvesting, wildfire, insect outbreaks, and mineral resource extraction. Forest restoration may take many decades and even centuries without act...
The long-term effectiveness of dry-forest fuels treatments (restoration thinning and prescribed burning) depends, in part, on the pace at which trees regenerate and recruit into the overstory. Knowledge of the factors that shape post-treatment regene...
Research Highlights: This study provides much needed insight into the development of resistance to disturbance and growth dynamics of overstory trees in response to restoration-based fuel reduction, and will be useful to scientists and managers attem...
Drought-caused tree dieback is an issue around the world as climates change and many areas become dryer and hotter. A drought from 1998–2004 resulted in a significant tree dieback event in many of the wooded areas in portions of the Jemez Mountains a...
Research Highlights: Herb-layer community composition, abundance, species richness, and Shannon–Wiener diversity index are shaped by nitrogen fertilization, disturbance history, and the overstory tree species in its immediate vicinity. Background and...
Freezing rain is a frequently occurring, but relatively rarely studied disturbance in Europe, although ice accumulation may occasionally cause severe damage for forestry. We aimed to characterize ice-accumulation damage to overstory trees in spruce s...
Masson pine (Pinus massoniana Lamb.) is a tree species that is widely distributed throughout southern China and holds significant economic and ecological value. The main objective of our study was to assess the effects of thinning on aboveground biom...
Applications of unmanned aerial systems for forest monitoring are increasing and drive a need to understand how image processing workflows impact end-user products’ accuracy from tree detection methods. Increasing image overlap and making acquisition...
In the central and eastern United States, many forest ecosystems have undergone recent shifts in composition and structure that may conflict with contemporary management objectives. Long-term forest inventory data were used to determine patterns of f...
In forests dominated by deciduous tree species, coniferous species are often disproportionately important because of their contrasting functional traits. Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus L.), once a widespread emergent canopy species, co-occurs with...
Forest fires spread via production and combustion of pyrolysis gases in the understory. The goal of the present paper is to understand the spatial location, distribution, and fraction (relative to the overstory) of understory plants, in this case, sp...
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...
While aboveground biomass and forest productivity can vary over abiotic gradients (e.g., temperature and moisture gradients), biotic factors such as biodiversity and tree species stand dominance can also strongly influence biomass accumulation. In th...
This study is concerned with the assessment of application possibilities for remote sensing data within a forest inventory in close-to-nature forests. A combination of discrete airborne laser scanning data and multispectral aerial images separately e...
Ecological stoichiometry plays important roles in understanding the nutrient constraints on tree growth and development, as well in maintaining ecosystem services in forests, yet the characteristics of carbon:nitrogen:phosphorous (C:N:P) stoichiometr...
Canopy hydrology and forest water inputs are directly linked to the physical properties of tree crowns (e.g., foliar and woody surfaces), which determine a tree’s capacity to intercept and retain incident rainfall. The changing forest structure...
A deeper understanding of the influence of fine-scale fuel patterns on fire behavior is essential to the design of forest treatments that aim to reduce fire hazard, enhance structural complexity, and increase ecosystem function and resilience. Of par...
Small-scale treefall gaps are among the most important forms of forest disturbance in tropical forests. These gaps expose surrounding trees to more light, promoting rapid growth of understory plants. However, the effects of such small-scale disturban...
Urbanization causes a variety of negative ecological impacts, impairing forests, streams, and other ecosystems. While urban forests are the subject of increasing research attention, planted urban forests are less well-understood than remnant forests;...
Forest three-dimensional (3-D) structure, in the vertical dimension, consists of at least two components, including overstory and a forest background matrix (i.e., shrubs, grass, and bare earth). Quantitatively characterizing the proportions of fores...
The severity of lodgepole pine mortality from mountain pine beetle outbreaks varies with host tree diameter, density, and other structural characteristics, influencing subcanopy conditions and tree regeneration. We measured density and leader growth...
The increase in compounding disturbances, such as “hotter droughts” coupled with insect outbreaks, has significant impacts on the integrity of forested ecosystems and their subsequent management for important ecosystem services and multiple-use objec...
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...
We examined the effects of repeated growing season prescribed fire on the structure and composition of mixed pine–hardwood forests in the southeastern Piedmont region, Georgia, USA. Plots were burned two to four times over an eight-year period with l...
Case studies of climate adaptation approaches are needed to inform the broader use of these strategies across longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) ecosystems in the Southern US. To address this need, we evaluated overstory structure and tree regener...
Cross Timbers forests, typically dominated by Quercus stellata Wangenh. and Q. marilandica Muenchh., are the transition zone between eastern deciduous forest and prairie in the southern Great Plains. Fire exclusion beginning in the mid-1900s has led...
(1) Stand-replacing fires may threaten the continued stability of mixed conifer forests in the U.S. Southwest. Increasing fire frequency and severity have made post-fire forest recovery trajectories uncertain for many coniferous species, potentially...
Western spruce budworm (Choristoneura freemani Razowski) is the most destructive defoliator of forests in the western US. Forests in northern New Mexico experienced high levels of WSBW-caused defoliation and subsequent mortality between the 1980s and...
Extensive bark beetle outbreaks have recently occurred in western North American forests, resulting in overstory tree mortality across millions of hectares. Annual aerial surveys are currently used to operationally monitor bark beetle induced tree mo...
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...
In the northern Appalachian region of North America, mortality of mature American beech (Fagus grandifolia Ehrh.) via the introduced beech bark disease (BBD) can result in dense thickets of beech saplings that inhibit the regeneration of other specie...
Emerald ash borer is an invasive pest in North American forests. Ecological impacts of ash mortality from emerald ash borer are wide-ranging, including shifts in insect communities and wildlife behavior. Additionally, loss of ash from forests may hav...
Herbicide flashback is an undesirable response that results in damage or mortality of non-target plants near chemically treated plants. In severe instances, crop trees can be injured resulting in financial loss or inability to capture management obje...
This study sought to estimate the potential impact of floodplain forest vegetation on sediment and phosphorus loading along the Iowa River in Iowa, USA. Thirty monitoring plots were established in forested conservation easements and similar public la...
Under recurring droughts, the southwestern U.S. loses a significant proportion of precipitation as evapotranspiration (ET), suggesting an opportunity to reduce ET via forest thinning. To better understand the potential impacts of thinning on the fore...
The role of intraspecific trait variation in functional ecology has gained traction in recent years as many papers have observed its importance in driving community diversity and ecology. Yet much of the work in this field relies on field-based trait...
We sought to answer the question: How do we restore characteristics of old-growth evergreen mixed-conifer forests in young even-aged stands on upland terrain at Headwaters Forest Reserve (HFR)? We described the old-growth reference condition for th...
Coffee (Coffea species) and Cocoa (Theobroma cacao) are important cash crops grown in the tropics but traded globally. This study was conducted to apply the ALMANAC model to these crops for the first time, and to test its ability to simulate them und...
Forest ecosystem attributes and their spatial variation across the landscape have the potential to subsequently influence variations in fire behavior. Understanding this variation is critical to fire managers in their ability to predict fire behavior...
The objective of forest management has become broader, and it is essential to harmonize timber production with conservation of the forest ecosystem. Selection cutting is recognized as a major alternative of clear-cutting, because it can maintain the...
Past restoration of hardwood forests prioritized planting of woody vegetation cover, particularly oaks (Quercus spp.). This restoration regime often did not consider other microhabitat components, which failed to restore habitat complexity. Giant can...
We studied branching in Sequoia sempervirens (Lamb. ex D. Don) Endl. (coast redwood) and Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco var. menziesii (coast Douglas-fir) because of their commercial value to coastal northern California. We focused on branching...
Over the past century the size and severity of wildfires, as well as post-fire recovery processes (e.g., seedling establishment), have been altered from historical levels due to management policies and changing climate. Tree seedling establishment an...
The reliability of airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for delineating individual trees and estimating aboveground biomass (AGB) has been proven in a diverse range of ecosystems, but can be difficult and costly to commission. Point clouds de...
Research Highlights: This study identifies the nitrogen (N) deposition effect on understory plants by altering directly soil nutrients or indirectly altering environmental factors in subtropical plantation. Background and Objectives: N deposition is...
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