BACKGROUND EuroAmerican land-use and its legacies have transformed forest structure and composition across the United States (US). More accurate reconstructions of historical states are critical to understanding the processes governing past, current, and future forest dynamics. Here we present new gridded (8x8km) reconstructions of pre-settlement (1800s) forest composition and structure from th...

What makes virgin forests better forests? Biodiversity evaluation depends on the value systems of the stakeholders involved. Indicators for conservation value, ecosystem functions, wilderness, uniqueness, or species richness may not correlate, or even correlate negatively. Based on arthropod data from a comparative study in two types of virgin forests in core areas of the Carpathian Biosphere R...

India’s forests have played an integral role in sustaining its people over many millennia. In addition to an abundance of nutritional, medicinal and subsistence goods, wilderness areas have provided the environment for spiritual and cultural expression of the Indian people. In the pre-British period, the ownership of forests was with the Kings, but the forest regimes were aimed at fair distribu...

BACKGROUND In the lower Mekong Basin and coastal zones of Southern Vietnam, forests dominated by the genus Melaleuca have two notable features: most have been substantially disturbed by human activity and can now be considered as degraded forests; and most are subject to acute pressures from climate change, particularly in regards to changes in the hydrological and sodicity properties of forest...

Soil bacteria may be influenced by vegetation and play important roles in global carbon efflux and nutrient cycling under global changes. Coniferous and broadleaved forests are two phyletically distinct vegetation types. Soil microbial communities in these forests have been extensively investigated but few studies have presented comparable data regarding the characteristics of bacterial communi...

A novel 3-step random forests methodology involving survival data (survival forests), ordinal data (multiclass forests), and continuous data (regression forests) is introduced for cancer staging. The methodology is illustrated for esophageal cancer using worldwide esophageal cancer collaboration data involving 4627 patients.

We propose random hinge forests, a simple, efficient, and novel variant of decision forests. Importantly, random hinge forests can be readily incorporated as a general component within arbitrary computation graphs that are optimized endto-end with stochastic gradient descent or variants thereof. We derive random hinge forest and ferns, focusing on their sparse and efficient nature, their min-ma...

One major concern regarding the biodiversity impacts of Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) is “leakage” of threats from REDD+ to non-REDD+ forests, particularly if those forests storing the highest amounts of carbon – and thus prioritized under REDD+ – do not coincide with those most important for biodiversity conservation. This concern applies globally, and has been p...

In recent decades, the area and proportion of planted forests have increased; thus, understanding the responses of planted and natural forests to drought are crucial because it forms the basis for forest risk assessments and management strategies. In this study, we combined the moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) enhanced vegetation index (EVI), meteorological aridity indices,...