Question: How do the diversity, size structure, and spatial pattern of woody species in a temperate (Mediterranean climate) forest compare to temperate and tropical forests? Location: Mixed evergreen coastal forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains, California, USA. Methods: We mapped, tagged, identified, and measured all woody stems ( 1 cm diameter) in a 6-ha forest plot, following Center for Tropic...

Studies of the effects of patch size and isolation on plant species density have yielded contrasting results. However, much of the available evidence comes from relatively recent anthropogenic forest fragments which have not reached equilibrium between extinction and immigration. This is a critical issue because the theory clearly states that only when equilibrium has been reached can the numbe...

Energy extraction within forest habitat is increasing at a rapid rate throughout eastern North America from the combined presence of conventional oil and gas, shale gas, and wind energy. We examined the effects of conventional oil and gas development on forest habitat including amounts of core and edge forest, the abundance of songbird species and guilds, species diversity, and community simila...

First attempts for the estimation of above ground forest biomass (AGB) by means of SAR, have used allometric equations to calculate biomass from the estimated PolInSAR forest height. However, changes in forest density or structure bias the known allometric relations. Today, remote sensing systems like SAR are able to measure additional parameters like vertical forest structure [1] [2]. In this ...

We assessed the size and composition of the seed bank in 31 plots representing a range of habitats within an old-growth, temperate deciduous forest at Mont St. Hilaire, Québec, Canada. We identified 49 taxa in the seed bank, with an average of 40 species·m–2 and a median density of 1218 seeds·m–2. The most frequent seeds were species of Carex and Rubus, Diervilla lonicera, and Eupatorium rugosu...

Mastication is a forest fuel thinning treatment that involves chipping or shredding small trees and shrubs and depositing the material across the forest floor. By decreasing forest density mastication has been shown to lessen crown fire hazard, yet other impacts have only recently started to be studied. Our study evaluates how mastication treatments alter the density and composition of soil see...

Management agencies and quantitative ecologists need robust estimates of population density. The best way of converting population estimates of livetrapped small mammals to population density is not clear. We estimated population density on livetrapping grids with 4 estimators applied to 3 species of boreal forest and 3 species of tundra rodents to test for relative differences in density estim...

Land-use dynamics and climatic gradients have large effects on many terrestrial systems. Exurban development, one of the fastest growing forms of land use in the United States, may affect wildlife through habitat fragmentation and building presence may alter habitat quality. We studied the effects of residential development and temperature gradients on bird species occurrence at 140 study sites...

Conspecific negative density-dependent establishment, in which local abundance negatively affects establishment of conspecific seedlings through host-specific enemies, can influence species diversity of plant communities, but the generality of this process is not well understood. We tested the strength of density dependence using the United States Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis ...

Floodplain roughness parameterization is one of the key elements of hydrodynamic modeling of river flow, which is directly linked to safety level estimation of lowland fluvial areas. Necessary input parameters are median grain size for unvegetated areas, vegetation density for forest and vegetation height and density for herbaceous vegetation. This paper presents a method for spatially distribu...