Forests, Volume 8, Issue 5

Drought is a major constraint of forest productivity and tree growth across diverse habitat types. In this study, we investigated the drought responses of four conifer species growing within two locations of differing elevation and climatic condition...

Woody debris, which is supplied by branch litter, is an important component of forest ecosystems as it contains large quantities of organic matter and nutrients. We evaluated changes in branch wood dry weight and nutrient content of six common specie...

The existence of endangered tree species in Mexico necessitates an understanding of their vulnerability to the predicted climate changes (warming and drying trends). In this study, the sensitivity to climate of earlywood (EW) and latewood (LW) widths...

Natural and anthropogenic disturbances alter canopy structure, understory vegetation, amount of woody debris, and the litter and soil layers in forest ecosystems. These environmental changes impact forest communities, including ground-dwelling invert...

Low harvesting costs and increasing demand for forest-derived biomass led to an increased use of full-tree (FT) harvesting in steep terrain areas in Austria. Logging residues, as a by-product of FT harvesting, present an easily accessible bioenergy r...

As a consequence of past decades of extensive afforestation in Norway, mature forest volumes are increasing. National forestry politics call for sustainable and efficient resource usage and for increased regional processing. Regional policies seek to...

Lebanon’s Ministry of Environment initiated a project in 2009 to determine low-cost reforestation techniques for stone pine (Pinus pinea) and Lebanon cedar (Cedrus libani) for large-scale land rehabilitation activities in the arid Middle East. Irriga...

Airborne laser scanner (ALS) data are used operationally to support field inventories and enhance the accuracy of forest biomass estimates. Modelling the relationship between ALS and field data is a fundamental step of such applications and the quali...

Smallholder tree plantations are expanding in the steepland tropics due to demand for timber and interest in ecosystem services, such as carbon storage. Financial mechanisms are developing to compensate vegetation carbon stores. However, measuring bi...

Sustainable forest management should avoid disturbance and volatilization of the soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) stocks both under present and projected future climate. Earlier studies have shown that thinning of European beech forests induces a str...

This paper introduces a mixed method approach for analyzing the determinants of natural latex yields and the associated spatial variations and identifying the most suitable regions for producing latex. Geographically Weighted Regressions (GWR) and It...

Most poplar plantations are planted on marginal agricultural land, but poplar plantations also hold the potential for increased profits compared to plantations of other species on non-agricultural, previously forested land. To date, the establishment...

In general, matrix models are commonly applied to predict tree growth for size-structured tree populations, whereas empirical–statistical models are designed to predict tree growth based on a vast amount of field observations. From the theoretical po...

In the species-rich and structurally complex forests of the Eastern United States, disturbance events are often partial and therefore difficult to detect using remote sensing methods. Here we present a set of new algorithms, collectively called Veget...

Many factors, with differing priority ratios, need to be assessed in the evaluation of forest roads. Stakeholder perceptions differ in the road assessment process and this research addresses those differences between academic and practitioner groups....

Tropical and subtropical dry forest life zones support forests with lower stature and species richness than do tropical and subtropical life zones with greater water availability. The number of naturalized species that can thrive and mix with native...

Dendrochronology is a very useful science to reconstruct the long-term responses of trees and other woody plants forming annual rings in response to their environment. The present review considered Mexico, a megadiverse country with a high potential...

Dead wood remaining after wildfires represents a biological legacy for forest regeneration, and its decay is both cause and consequence of a large set of ecological processes. However, the rate of wood decomposition after fires is still poorly unders...

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...

Ecosystem services consistently group together both spatially and cognitively into “bundles”. Understanding socio-economic predictors of these bundles is essential to informing a management approach that emphasizes equitable distribution of ecosystem...

Hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), Adelges tsugae Annand, an invasive insect native to the Pacific Northwest and Asia, is responsible for widespread health decline and mortality of native hemlocks (Tsuga spp.) in the eastern United States. Shading and fer...

The Eschweilera genus has great ecological and economic importance due to its wide abundance in the Amazon basin. One potential use for the Eschweilera genus is in forest management, where just a few trees are removed per hectare. In order to improve...

American beech (Fagus grandifolia Ehrh.) is a dominant component of forest tree cover over a large portion of eastern North America and this deciduous, mast-bearing tree species plays a key role in these forest ecosystems. Beech bark disease (BBD) is...

In order to induce unreduced pollens, microsporogenesis and male flower bud (MFB) development were compared in rubber tree clone RRIM 600. We observed strong asynchronism in different MFBs in an inflorescence. Asynchronism of microsporogenesis in dif...

Urban green spaces have been shown to decrease land surface temperature (LST) significantly. However, few studies have explored the relationships between urban green spaces and LST across different seasons at different spatial scales. In this study,...

This study focuses on the horizontal and vertical accuracy of point-clouds based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery. The DJI Phantom 3 Professional unmanned aerial vehicle and Agisoft PhotoScan Professional software were used for the evaluation...

Global climate change represents a moving target for plant acclimation and/or adaptation, especially in the Mediterranean basin. In this study, the interactions of severe drought (20% of the effective daily evapotranspiration) and O₃ fumigation (80 p...

A key challenge for reducing emission from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in developing countries is to balance the power of various stakeholders in decision making. This study explores the forms of stakeholder participation in the imple...

The disease triangle is a basic and highly flexible tool used extensively in forest pathology. By linking host, pathogen, and environmental factors, the model provides etiological insights into disease emergence. Landscape ecology, as a field, focuse...

From the timber we use to the oxygen in the air we breathe, humans are intimately connected to the complex forested ecosystems that many of us take for granted.[...]

Ulmus glabra Hudson, or Wych elm, occurs as fragmented and relict natural populations in the Central System, which acts as a refugium in the Iberian Peninsula. Considering the importance of the Central System populations of U. glabra, the main object...

Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens (Lamb. ex. D. Don) Endl.) is unique among conifer species because of its longevity, the great sizes of individual trees, and its propensity to reproduce through sprouts. Timber harvesting in the native redwood rang...

Spatial heterogeneity of vegetation is an important landscape characteristic, but is difficult to assess due to scale-dependence. Here we examine how spatial patterns in the forest canopy affect those of understory plants, using the shrub Canada buff...

Fungi in the Botryosphaeriaceae are important plant pathogens that persist endophytically in infected plant hosts. Lasiodiplodia theobromae is a prominent species in this family that infects numerous plants in tropical and subtropical areas. We chara...

Crown profile models were developed for north, east, south, and west crown directions of dominant trees, intermediate trees, and suppressed trees in planted stands of Larix olgensis Henry in Northeast China. A total of 139 sample trees were randomly...

Along with sequestering C in forest, trees on farms are able to contribute to greenhouse mitigation through emission avoidance mechanisms. To evaluate the magnitude of these contributions, emission avoidance contributions for field and farmstead wind...

The full value of benefits rendered from healthy watersheds is difficult to estimate, and ecosystem service (ES) valuation sometimes necessarily occurs in the form of costs incurred or avoided. Along these lines, social-ecological systems including P...

The North American Monsoon delivers warm season precipitation to much of the southwestern United States, yet the importance of this water source for forested ecosystems in the region is not well understood. While it is widely accepted that trees in s...

Forested buffer strips are typically prescribed around water bodies during forest harvesting operations to minimize effects on aquatic communities and to maintain fish and wildlife habitat. It has been argued that the systematic application of these...