VHF-band SAR holds great promise for forest stem volume mapping. The paper describes a coherent scattering model and demonstrates that radar backscattering is mainly proportional to stem volume in coniferous forests. The model is also used to develop inverse methods. It is noted that a sloping ground may change the backscattering significantly and therefore needs compensation. Results of stem v...

Fungal endophytes are microfungi that live in plants without causing apparent symptoms of infection. This study was conducted to identify endophytic fungi isolated from leaves of coniferous trees in Bohyeon Mountain of Korea. We collected leaves of two species of coniferous trees, Pinus densiflora and Pinus koraiensis, from 11 sites in the study area. A total 58 isolates were obtained and ident...

Information on responses of higher organisms to climate change is dominated by events in spring. Far less is known about autumnal events and virtually nothing about communities of microorganisms. We analyzed autumnal fruiting patterns of macrofungi over the past 56 years and found that average first fruiting date of 315 species is earlier, while last fruiting date is later. Fruiting of mycorrhi...

Lichens are a key component of forest biodiversity. However, a comprehensive study analyzing lichen species richness in relation to several management types, extending over different regions and forest stages and including information on site conditions is missing for temperate European forests. In three German regions (Schwäbische Alb, Hainich-Dün, Schorfheide-Chorin), the so-called Biodiversi...

Before European settlement of the interior west of the United States, coniferous forests of this region were influenced by many disturbance regimes, primarily fires, insects, diseases, and herbivory, which maintained a diversity of successional stages and vegetative types across landscapes. Activities after settlement, such as fire suppression, grazing, and logging significantly altered these d...

We investigated the influence of slight thinning (percentage of woods: 16.6%, basal area: 9.3%) on landscape appreciation and the psychological restorative effect of an on-site setting by exposing respondents to an ordinarily managed coniferous woodland. The experiments were conducted in an experimental plot in the same coniferous woodland in May (unthinned) and October 2013 (thinned). The resp...

Discovering how to best protect one of the most endangered animals in the world, giant pandas, has always been an important project in ecological studies. Moreover, researching the living environments of giant pandas and how to recover them is one of the most important elements to these studies. In order to more effectively protect the giant pandas and their habitats, we studied the changing of...

Facilitation of tree regeneration by nurse shrubs that offer protection against large herbivores is an important driver of wood-pasture dynamics. Here we asked whether the response to facilitation by nurse shrubs depends on the grazing resistance of the protégé saplings. We experimentally tested the protective effects of the thorny Rosa rubiginosa on browsing frequency, survival, and biomass ch...

Gene flow through dispersal has traditionally been thought to function as a force opposing evolutionary differentiation. However, directional gene flow may actually reinforce divergence of populations in close proximity. This study documents the phenotypic differentiation over more than two decades in body size (tarsus length) at a very short spatial scale (1.1 km) within a population of pied f...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Leaf Area Index (LAI) Product (MOD15A2) was evaluated for the growing seasons of 2000 through 2004 in Alaska. The LAI estimate may be affected by three factors not directly related to canopy leaf area: snow melt, cloud contamination and conifer forest versus broadleaf shrub canopy type. Increases in MODIS LAI values occurred during the s...