Gap distributions in forests reflect the spatial impact of man-made tree harvesting or naturally-induced patterns of tree death being caused by windthrow, inter-tree competition, disease or senescence. Gap sizes can vary from large (>100 m) to small (<10 m), and they may have contrasting spatial patterns, such as being aggregated or regularly distributed. However, very small gaps cannot easily ...

Approximately 3000 million ha of the world’s forests have been classified as productive, and are subject to some kind of management. Considering their environmental and social importance, the managed forest ecosystems are not receiving as much scientific attention as the few remaining unmanaged ones. This is especially true in the growing urban landscapes where managed forest ecosystem provide ...

Managed riparian forest buffers are an important conservation practice but there are little data on the water quality effects of buffer management. We measured surface runoff volumes and nutrient concentrations and loads in a riparian buffer system consisting of (moving down slope from the field) a grass strip, a managed forest, and an unmanaged forest. The managed forest consisted of sections ...

the aim of this study is to investigate the tree species&apos; diversity in a region with no management planning and introduce the calculated indices as the norm for sustainability assessment. dbh of all tree individuals, and their stories were recorded in the inventory grid (75 m × 100 m) sample plots. subsequently, richness, evenness (simpson, smith & wilson) and heterogeneity (simpson, shann...

We used the SLEUTH urban growth model, closely coupled with a land transition model, to simulate future urban growth in the Houston metropolitan area, one of the fastest growing metropolises in the United States during the past three decades. The model was calibrated with historical data extracted from a time series of satellite images. Three specific scenarios are designed to simulate the spat...

Persistent changes in tree mortality rates can alter forest structure, composition, and ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration. Our analyses of longitudinal data from unmanaged old forests in the western United States showed that background (noncatastrophic) mortality rates have increased rapidly in recent decades, with doubling periods ranging from 17 to 29 years among regions. Increa...

We investigated the influence of forest management on landscape appreciation and psychological restoration in on-site settings by exposing respondents to an unmanaged, dense coniferous (crowding) forest and a managed (thinned) coniferous forest; we set the two experimental settings in the forests of the Fuji Iyashinomoroi Woodland Study Center. The respondents were individually exposed to both ...