Rooted in Research

Private Lands Hold the Key to Oak Sustainability in Eastern U.S. Forests

Issue 44 | December 2024

In the eastern United States, oak ecosystems historically dominated eastern hardwood forests and provided significant ecological, economic, and aesthetic benefits. However, shifts in forest composition—attributed to factors including fire suppression, climate change, land use changes, and management practices—have led to a rise in shade-tolerant, mesophytic species like maples. These shifts...

Reducing Flooding Risk and Maintaining Ecosystem Services in a Wetter New England

Issue 43 | November 2024

Developed river corridors, resistant bedrock, steep channels, and confined valleys predispose New England to flooding. The region has experienced substantial flooding in recent years, which may continue due to rising temperatures and increased precipitation. To reduce future flooding, intervention is necessary.In a recent publication, research biologist Keith Nislow, U.S. Department of Agricult...

Soil Biodiversity from Above: Remote Sensing Finds Relationship Between Forest Structure and Microbial Diversity

Issue 42 | November 2024

Biodiversity is declining in many regions of the world. Scientists know more about the diversity of aboveground organisms (like trees, plants, and animals) because they are easier to detect and measure than belowground organisms (like bacteria and fungi). Estimating belowground biodiversity usually involves extracting and sequencing DNA from soil, an expensive process that provides information ...

A Breath of Cold Air: Surprising Forest Patterns Hint at Climate Change Refuges

Issue 41 | October 2024

Air temperature typically decreases with elevation—anyone who has hiked up a mountain is likely to have noticed that the air temperature drops towards the top. Occasionally, however, cold, dense air settles in low-lying valleys and creates an inversion in the temperature gradient. In these locations, lower elevation areas are temporarily cooler than areas higher up. This fine-scale process, c...

Long-Term Ecological Effects of Prescribed Burning and Mechanical Treatments on Eastern Oak Forests

Issue 40 | October 2024

Eastern oak (Quercus spp.) forests in the United States have experienced significant ecological changes over the past century due to fire exclusion and land-use changes. Historically, anthropogenic (human-ignited) fire regimes maintained oak dominance by reducing mesophytic (shade-tolerant, fire-intolerant) competitors, such as red maple (Acer rubrum) and American beech (Fagus grandifolia). Wit...

Managing Mercury: Insights from Monitoring and Manipulation at the Marcell Experimental Forest

Issue 01 | Science Bulletin | September 2024

Mercury is a persistent environmental pollutant emitted from fossil fuel combustion. It is widely dispersed in the environment and can be especially concentrated in peatlands. Peatlands provide many ecosystem services, such as carbon storage, water filtration, and wildlife habitat. However, environmental conditions in peatlands can be conducive to the formation of the highly toxic methylmercury...

Tracking Emerging Infectious Diseases That Threaten Forests

Issue 39 | September 2024

Around the world, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are affecting tree populations and changing forest communities. More widespread and severe in recent decades, these diseases harm native plant populations and the health of commercially available plants used in landscaping, agriculture, and forestry. One of the more extreme examples is chestnut blight, which killed most of the American chest...

Assessing Assisted Migration Under Climate Change Scenarios

Issue 38 | August 2024

Climate Change, Forests, and a Potential StrategyClimate change is bringing rapid changes to the environment, including new temperature ranges and precipitation regimes. Some trees may no longer thrive and regenerate in their current locations, which in turn may reduce the ecosystem goods and services they have produced in the past. One adaptive solution being studied is assisted migration, a s...

Deer Exclusion Fences Help Hybrid Chestnut Seedlings Thrive

Issue 37 | August 2024

American chestnuts (Castanea dentata) were once abundant in the eastern United States, until the non-native diseases chestnut blight fungus and ink disease devastated their numbers in the 19th and 20th centuries. By the 1950s, American chestnuts were functionally extinct, meaning that the species no longer plays a viable role in the ecosystem. Today, 10 percent of the original population remain...

Abrupt Increase in Stream Water Nitrate Can Be Caused by Multiple Climate-Related Factors Over Time

Issue 36 | August 2024

For decades, researchers at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest have monitored nitrate levels in streams to better understand nitrogen cycling in forests. Researchers have reported that peaks in stream water nitrate levels often occur within months of single disturbance events, such as clearcutting or ice storms.In the summer of 2013, researchers discovered a sharp increase, or pulse, of nitr...

The Enduring World Forest Carbon Sink: Key Findings and Policy Implications

Issue 35 | July 2024

Forests play a critical role in mitigating climate change by sequestering carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. A new study led by Yude Pan, research scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station, provides a unique perspective and a long-term, ground based benchmark on the recent magnitude, trends, drivers, and locations of Earth’s critical f...

Understanding Old-Growth Forest Carbon Storage Potential in the Central Hardwoods Region

Issue 34 | July 2024

Stretching from Missouri through Arkansas to Georgia and New York and covering 609,000 square kilometers, the Central Hardwoods region is the world’s largest continuous deciduous forested area. Today, most of the forests in the Central Hardwoods region are second-growth forests, meaning that they have been harvested once in the past two centuries. Very few of the forests are old-growth forest...

Impacts of 1930s Redlining Practices on Urban Tree Cover Persist Today

Issue 33 | June 2024

Between 1935 and 1940, the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation assigned grades to neighborhoods in hundreds of U.S. cities. The grades supposedly reflected real estate risk and mortgage security and were based in part on recent sales histories and a neighborhood’s proximity to various industries. Significantly, residents’ race, religion, class, and ethnicity were also consi...

Living the DREAM: Implementing the Desired REgeneration through Assisted Migration (DREAM) Framework for Climate-adaptive Silviculture

Issue 32 | May 2024

Climate change is outpacing the natural migration rates of many tree species in eastern North America. The local climates in which many tree species are naturally found may become unsuitable in the future. This mismatch could reduce forests’ ability to provide ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, and forest products.One proactive solution to these challenges is f...

SheFire: A New Tool for Measuring Soil Temperatures

Issue 31 | May 2024

Fire is complex and can transform forest ecosystems in ways that affect carbon storage, nutrient cycling, and ecosystem recovery. Methods for measuring the visible, aboveground characteristics of fire have substantially progressed in recent decades, but measuring the unseen, belowground effects of fire remains challenging. The increasing intensity and incidence of wildfire, particularly in the ...

Seed Banks Provide a Peek into Past and Future Fire Adaptation

Issue 30 | May 2024

Seed banks can provide insight into a forest’s past and give land managers valuable information to help them plan for the forest’s future. For example, knowing which species may germinate after future fires is valuable, especially when nonnative invasive species in the seed bank could proliferate quickly following disturbances.In this study, researchers analyzed the species composition of b...

Loggers and Foresters: Vital Voices for Forest Health Research

Issue 29 | May 2024

Recognizing the involvement of various stakeholders in managing pests, diseases, and forest disturbances is critical for managing forest health. Although there has been substantial focus on the biological and ecological aspects of forest health in the peer-reviewed literature, there is a significant gap in understanding the human dimensions of forest health, especially from the perspective of f...

Where Humans and Forests Meet: The Rapidly Growing Wildland-Urban Interface

Issue 28 | April 2024

People love to live near forests, lakes, open space, and scenic beauty. These natural settings draw people to build homes in areas classified as the wildland-urban interface (WUI): spaces where human development meets the natural world. Although houses in the WUI are built on private land, they are often close to national forests, within inholdings (patches of private land within national fores...

Monitoring Fuel Loads and Prescribed Fire Effects with Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Issue 27 | April 2024

Key Management ConsiderationsTerrestrial laser scanning can provide fuel structure and biomass estimates to describe forest conditions and management outcomes and gather fuel inputs for fire behavior models.Terrestrial laser scanning can scan a plot in under a minute—a fraction of the time it would take a person to collect data using traditional means—and can be done with the push of a sing...

A New Decision Support Tool for Preventing the Spread of Aquatic Invasive Species

Issue 26 | March 2024

Every time a watercraft moves from one lake to another, it could potentially carry an aquatic invasive species (AIS) attached to the exterior, in bilge water, or in bait buckets. Aquatic invasive species can cause ecological and economic damage by degrading water quality, which in turn can harm fisheries, native species, and human health. Invasive species may also interfere with human use of la...

How Will Recreation on Public Lands Be Different in 2050?

Issue 25 | February 2024

Anticipating and preparing for the future are among the challenges land managers face when making decisions about how to balance the public’s desire for outdoor recreation with ecological concerns. A recent General Technical Report by Lynne Westphal, emerit research social scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Northern Research Station, aims to assist managers by an...

Chestnut Restoration Threatened by Root Rot

Issue 24 | January 2024

Once a dominant species in the eastern United States, the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) was largely wiped out by chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) in the early 20th century. Only 10 percent of the original population remains, and most of these trees are less than 1 inch in diameter. Until recently, restoration efforts have not considered another primary threat: Phytophthora cinn...

A bird’s eye view: anticipating avian outcomes of forest management

Issue 23 | January 2024

Forest management decisions can have both positive and negative impacts on biodiversity, including bird species. Silvicultural treatments such as thinning, single-tree selection, and other methods can influence bird abundance and diversity because different species have different habitat, diet, breeding, and migration needs.To better understand how forest management activities affect bird popul...

Medium or heavy selection cutting? New results challenge conventional practice

Issue 22 | January 2024

Nestled in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in northern Wisconsin, the Argonne Experimental Forest has supported foundational silviculture research for more than 75 years. Generations of scientists have collected and analyzed data to better understand the effects of different management strategies on second-growth northern hardwood forests.The highest priority study on the Argonne Experi...

Containing Oak Wilt with Girdling and Herbicide

Issue 21 | November 2023

Oak wilt is an aggressive vascular disease that typically kills infected trees within 3 to 8 months. It is particularly lethal for trees in the red oak group (section Lobatae). Oak wilt is caused by the fungus Bretziella fagacearum and transmitted over land by sap beetles (Coleoptera: Nitidulidea). Although the disease can be transmitted over land by sap beetles, the majority of oak wilt is spr...

Effects of Stand Age on Aboveground Live Tree Carbon Stock and Change in Forests

Issue 20 | November 2023

The role of forests in the global carbon cycle and opportunities to use natural climate solutions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions have gained attention for a number of reasons including the Trillion Trees Initiative, California's cap and trade legislation, corporate netzero pledges, and recent federal and state policy initiatives. Forest carbon sequestration is an essential part of natural...

Simulating the Spring Hill Fire: Using QUICFire to Predict Wildfire Size and Spread

Issue 19 | September 2023

Accurately modeling wildland fire behavior is crucial for both planning prescribed burns and responding to wildfires. Predicting fire behavior, however, is difficult. Fuel and atmospheric factors change and interact in complex ways across space and time, even within a single prescribed burn. Many fire simulation models exist. These models range from simple models that are easy to run but lack c...

Honeysuckle Management Shows Promise for Improving Forest Health Along Waterways

Issue 18 | September 2023

Across the United States, rivers and streams connect people with recreation opportunities, drinking water, and complex and critical ecosystems. Riparian forests perform important ecosystem services, including filtering nutrients, preventing soil erosion, filtering sediment from runoff, and offering shade and wildlife habitat. Without these crucial forest buffers, the likelihood of croplands and...

Earthworms, Deer, and Canopy Gaps: Understanding Disturbance Interactions in Temperate Forests

Issue 17 I August 2023

Disturbances change our forests. However, we are only just beginning to explore how disturbances can affect each another or how they might be “linked.” By understanding disturbance links, we may be able manipulate one forest disturbance to manage another.New research published in the journal Ecology highlights some unexpected disturbance linkages in the North Woods of Wisconsin. The team, l...

Long-Term Climate Monitoring Sheds Light on Complex Forest and Freshwater Systems

Issue 16 I July 2023

Together, forests and freshwater ecosystems provide many services that people rely on such as erosion and flood control, carbon sequestration, drinking water, wildlife habitat, and recreation. Scientists are trying to understand how climate change is altering the composition and functioning of these complex and critical systems.Studying the impacts of climate change is often limited by a lack o...

Carbon Sinks in a Changing Climate

Issue 15 I July 2023

Over 65 million years ago, the planet experienced a cooling period, and as a result, temperate forests sprang up around the globe. Today, temperate forests blanket approximately 10 million square kilometers (3.1 million square miles) of the Earth’s surface and are the most managed forest type worldwide. In the face of climate change, these forests have emerged as a critical player in absorbin...

Whatever the Soil Conditions, Urban Forest Patches Are Important

Issue 14 | May 2023

There are nearly one million small forest patches in the Northeast United States alone. For many Americans, interacting with these patches is the main way they spend time with trees. Urban forests, large and small, provide numerous environmental benefits to people. According to Nancy Sonti, a research ecologist at the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station, “Recent research shows that...

Controlling an Introduced Invasive: On the Search for Ailanthus' Achilles Heel

ISSUE 13 | JANUARY 2023

Over 200 years ago, Ailanthus altissima (tree-of-heaven) was introduced to the United States for use as an ornamental. The tree was recognized for its ability to tolerate various soil types and climates, rapid growth, high reproductive capacity, and lack of apparent insect pests or diseases. Initially, Ailanthus represented a reliable tree to plant in cities and revegetate disturbed areas. Toda...

Forest Inventory and Analysis: Mining a Treasure Trove

ISSUE 12 | DECEMBER 2022

Since the late 1920s, the Forest Service has been congressionally mandated to collect, analyze, and report information on the status and trends of America's forests. This includes a suite of measurements on trees (live and dead) and other forest vegetation. Over time, this ongoing effort has evolved into the Forest Inventory and Analysis program. Today, FIA field crews routinely collect a core ...

Black Cherry: Evolution of a Species

ISSUE 11 | OCTOBER 2022

For the last century black cherry (Prunus serotina) has comprised a significant portion of the tree canopy across the Allegheny National Forest. But black cherry's rise to prominence has a complicated history. Following unsustainable timber harvesting in the early 20th century, clearcut forests encouraged pioneer species such as black cherry to thrive. Industrialization later increased the amou...

Pollution Solutions: Maximizing the Cleaning Power of Trees

ISSUE 10 | JUNE 2022

It is hard to imagine the vast expanse of the Great Lakes being anything but pristine, yet trouble roils just beneath the surface. The Great Lakes contain roughly 90 percent of the surface freshwater supply in the United States - and 20 percent of the world's freshwater supply. In recent years, increases in the use of electronics, pharmaceuticals, and personal care products has led to an increa...

Northern Research Station Scientists Answer Fundamental Questions about Mixedwood Forests

ISSUE 9 | JANUARY 2022

Today, more than one-quarter of forests in the northeastern and north-central United States are characterized as mixedwoods–a mixture of hardwoods, like oak (Quercus) and maple (Acer), and softwoods, like pine (Pinus) and hemlock (Tsuga), with neither type making up more than 80 percent of forest composition. These temperate mixedwood forests spread across nearly 47 million acres in the Unite...

On the Search for Success: Revisiting Group Selection in Promoting Northern Hardwood Forest Biodiversity

ISSUE 8 | OCTOBER 2021

If you walk through a northern hardwood forest in the Lakes States region today, you'll likely experience something different than your ancestors would have centuries ago. Instead of a variety of species, including eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), paper birch (Betula papyrifera), and eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) saplings, you'll likely see a proliferation of sugar maples (Acer saccharu...

Seeing Our Future More Clearly: How One Peatland Study is Changing How We Think About Carbon

ISSUE 7 | AUGUST 2021

On a 20-acre bog in the Marcell Experimental Forest in northern Minnesota, 10 open-topped chambers rise more than 23 feet out of the peatland, connected by walkways that seem to float over a layer of Sphagnum moss. "Some people have compared it to the science fiction scene of an alien landing spot on planet Earth," says Stephen Sebestyen, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Department of Agric...

The Climate Change Tree Atlas: Managing Tree Species in the Face of Climate Change

ISSUE 6 | JUNE 2021

For 20 years, the Climate Change Tree Atlas has given foresters insight into tree species trends and how possible future climate scenarios may affect eastern tree species' habitat suitability. The Climate Change Tree Atlas recently underwent a major overhaul. Now even more resources are available to land managers looking for detailed data sets and maps on species traits, habitat quality, land c...

Leaving It Messy: Using Tip-up Mounds to Promote Tree Species Diversity

ISSUE 5 | APRIL 2021

When a tree falls in the woods, should it be removed? In managed forests, common practices call for cleaning up and removing timber following a blowdown. But when Northern Research Station research forester Christel Kern sees the root mass of a fallen tree, she's more likely to see it as an opportunity. Her work is described in a 2019 Forest Ecology and Management article entitled Mounds Facili...

Saving Eastern Oak Forests: Prescribed Fire Impact on Timber Quality

ISSUE 4 | FEBRUARY 2021

Oak-dominated ecosystems in the eastern United States rely on periodic fire to create conditions that are conducive to oak regeneration. However, concern about reducing timber quality has made some managers wary of using fire as a management tool. A team of Northern Research Station scientists, foresters, and ecologists are collaborating to assess timber quality by inventorying trees across mul...

Restoring Pine Barrens Habitat: Optimizing Soil Conditions with Prescribed Fire

ISSUE 3 | DECEMBER 2020

Scattered throughout the Midwest and elsewhere in North America, pine barrens communities occur on sandy, infertile soils and are characterized by low tree density and an understory of grasses and other fire-dependent species. These communities are highly important as refugia for many threatened, endangered, and sensitive species, including sharp-tailed grouse and several butterflies.Northern R...

Reshaping Great Lakes pine forests: Adapting to drought and climate change

ISSUE 2 | OCTOBER 2020

The red pine forests of the western Great Lakes region aren't what they used to be.For a century, scientists and foresters have viewed these forests as structurally simple, single-cohort stands of red pine (Pinus resinosa) originating after stand-replacement fires. Forest managers emulated this perceived model in their management and have long grown even-aged red pine plantations.But after a ce...

Reading the Foodscape: Advances in White-Tailed Deer Habitat Management

ISSUE 1 | AUGUST 2020

White-tailed deer have an interesting and complicated recent history. While widespread hunting nearly a century ago drastically reduced the species' population, conservation programs and regulated hunting have caused overall populations to rebound significantly. For decades, high-density deer populations have suppressed forest growth, decimated certain wildflower and shrub species, and degraded...