Timber harvesting, with and without prescribed slash ®re, and wild ®re are common disturbances in pine forests of western North America. These disturbances can alter soil nitrogen (N) pools and N supply to colonizing vegetation, but their in ̄uence remains poorly understood for many forests. We investigated the effects of clear cut harvesting and ®re on KCl extractable N pools, net N mineralizat...

Land-use changes threaten biodiversity and ecosystem services. Some of the last remaining forest fragments in Ethiopia, and the world’s only habitats that retain genetically diverse wild Arabica coffee populations, have experienced rapid recent conversion to coffee farms, plantations and agricultural fields. We examined patterns of remnant woody plant diversity in the remaining forests, and ass...

Effects of prescribed fires on the 1-year establishment of white oak seedlings were investigated on the Clemson Experimental Forest, South Carolina, USA. Three stands, each consisting of a burn and a control treatment of about 1 ha in size, were examined in the study. On each burn and control treatment, six to eight dominant white oak trees were randomly selected along the slope and four 2-m ra...

Forest regenerationmethods such as shelterwood treatments have been shown to substantially increase the diversity of bird species, specifically of species that prefer early seral forests, now rare in the eastern United States. Stand improvement techniques such as thinnings have also been found to increase avian diversity under some conditions. A sustainably managed forest, however, must simulta...

We investigated spatial configuration of economic returns, to enhance models of forest fragmentation for western Oregon and western Washington. Drawing from spatial land rent theory, economic drivers of forest fragmentation at the landscape level include land quality comprised of attributes such as soil fertility or the distance of urban plots to amenities. We included the spatial configuration...

We investigated how legal logging history and recent illegal logging affected forest bird community structure in Ghana. Ghanaian forests belong to West Africa’s highly fragmented Upper Guinea rain forests, part of a global priority ‘‘biodiversity hotspot’’ under intense pressure from anthropogenic degradation. Between 1995 and 2010, officially-reported legal logging intensities increased up to ...

Various coarse graining schemes have been proposed to speed up computer simulations of the motion within large biomolecules, which can contain hundreds of thousands of atoms. We point out here that there is a very natural way of doing this, using the rigid regions identified within a biomolecule as the coarse grain elements. Subsequently, computer resources can be concentrated on the flexible c...

In this study, artificial neural network analyses (ANN) were used to identify the forcing environmental variables that are most significant in governing the transpiration rates of an Austrian Pine stand and its forest floor. Latent heat flux densities (Lh) of the Austrian Pine stand and its forest floor were separately measured using the eddy covariance technique. To assess the sensitivity of t...

In many areas, chemical and biological characteristics of soils change when trees colonize meadows. To determine if the invasion of high meadows by forests in the central Cascade Mountains of Oregon altered soil properties, we measured soil properties along transects from mountain meadows through transition zones, where trees were becoming established, into mature forest. The differences observ...

Information on the amount, distribution, and characteristics of coarse woody debris (CWD) in forest ecosystems is in high demand by wildlife biologists, fire specialists, and ecologists. In its important role in wildlife habitat, fuel loading, forest productivity, and carbon sequestration, CWD is an indicator of forest health. Because of this, the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research ...