One of the greatest challenges for ecologists this century will be restoring forests on degraded tropical lands. This restoration will require understanding complex processes that shape successional pathways, including interactions between trees and other plants. Shrub species often quickly invade disturbed tropical lands, yet little is known about whether they facilitate or inhibit subsequent ...

In the wake of numerous catastrophic wildfires, forest management policies have been implemented in recent years in the United States, including the Healthy Forest Restoration Act of 2003. A key premise underlying these policies is that fire suppression has resulted in denser forests than were present historically in some forest types. We evaluate this premise for the montane zone of the northe...

Conservation of tropical biodiversity in agricultural landscapes has become more important as the area covered by natural ecosystems decreases. We analyzed the effects of local livelihoods, cooperative types, and selected biophysical variables (elevation, slope, percent shade, distance to the forest, coffee density, and coffee age) on tree biodiversity in shade coffee cooperatives of El Salvado...

We determined the amount of information needed to estimate watershed-scale transpiration in a Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica D. Don) forest from sap flow measurements of individual trees. Measurements of tree biometrics (diameter at breast height (DBH) and tree sapwood area (AS_tree)), and tree-to-tree and radial variations in xylem sap flux density (Fd) were made in two stand plots, an u...

Estimation and mapping of forest resources are preconditions for management, planning and research. In this study, we applied kriging interpolation of geostatistics for estimation and mapping of forest stock at-tributes in a natural, uneven-aged, unmanaged forest in the Caspian region of northern Iran. The site of the study has an area of 516 ha and an elevation that ranges from 1100 to 1450 m ...

Water scarcity contributes to the poverty of around one-third of the world's people. Despite many benefits, tree planting in dry regions is often discouraged by concerns that trees reduce water availability. Yet relevant studies from the tropics are scarce, and the impacts of intermediate tree cover remain unexplored. We developed and tested an optimum tree cover theory in which groundwater rec...

We present a plug-in method for estimating the cluster tree of a density. The method takes advantage of the ability to exactly compute the level sets of a piecewise constant density estimate. We then introduce clustering with confidence, an automatic pruning procedure that assesses significance of splits (and so clusters) in the cluster tree; the only user input required is the desired confiden...

In vertebrates, gliding evolved as a mode of energy‐efficient locomotion to move between trees. Gliding vertebrate richness is hypothesised increase with tree height and decrease density but empirical evidence for this scarce, especially at global scale. Here, we test the ability explain species vertebrates globally compared all while controlling biogeographical climatic factors. We compiled da...

In this paper, we prove that the probability kernel of a random walk on a trinomial tree converges to the density of a Brownian motion with drift at the rate O(h), where h is the distance between the nodes of the tree. We also show that this convergence estimate is optimal in which the density of the random walk cannot converge at a faster rate. The proof is based on an application of spectral ...