The newest edition is published by the U.S. Forest Service, Northeastern Area State and Private Forestry. This edition includes a number of new pests, many of them found on fir Christmas trees. The original manual had a strong emphasis on Scotch pine. Most of the original pest descriptions remain in the manual; however, given that Christmas tree growers are growing more fir and other species, new pest problems needed to be addressed.

As the largest of the 15 food and nutrition assistance programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a central component of our nation's nutrition assistance safety net. SNAP provides nutrition assistance benefits and nutrition education services to low-income individuals and families in an effort to reduce hunger and improve the health and well-being of low-income people nationwide. While evaluation research has assessed whether the program is achieving these objectives, less is known about the challenges...

China's 2014/15 corn production is estimated at 214.0 million tons, down 3.0 million tons or 1.0 percent from last month and down 4.5 million tons or 2.0 percent from last year's record crop. Area is estimated at 36.8 million hectares, surpassing last year's record by 1.0 percent. Area has shown a strong upward trend in recent years, particularly in Northeast China, as farmers have switched to corn from less profitable crops such as soybeans. Yield is estimated at 5.82 tons per hectare, down 1 percent from last month and down 3.4 percent from last year's record. The revision is based on...

USDA estimates 2014/15 Canada rapeseed production at 15.25 million tons, down 2.9 percent from last month and down 15 percent from last year's record level. Harvested area is estimated at 7.7 million hectares, down 3.9 percent from last year and down 3.8 percent from last month. The reduction in estimated area is due to unseeded acreage and late June flooding that impacted southeast Saskatchewan and southwest Manitoba. Yield is forecast at 1.98 tons per hectare, down 12 percent from last year's record but up 0.9 percent from last month. Rapeseed development in the Western Prairies is still...

Identifying the appropriate sampling technique first requires the identification of the proper vegetation characteristic or attribute to measure. To do this the examiner must consider objectives, life form (grass, forb, shrub, or tree), distribution patterns of individuals of a species, distribution patterns between species (community mosaic pattern), efficiency of data collection from an economic standpoint, and accuracy and precision of the data.

SOLVE is a computer program that assists sawmill managers in improving efficiency and solving problems commonly found in hardwood sawmills. SOLVE provides information on key operational factors including log size distribution, lumber grade yields, lumber recovery factor and overrun, and break-even log costs.

Ecoregional conservation planning for priority landbirds requires methods that explicitly link populations to habitat conditions at multiple scales. We developed Habitat Suitability Index (HSI) models to assess habitat quality for 40 priority bird species in the Central Hardwoods and West Gulf Coastal Plain/Ouachitas Bird Conservation Regions. The models incorporated both site and landscape environmental variables derived from one of six nationally consistent datasets: ecological subsections from the National Ecological Unit Hierarchy, National Land Cover Dataset, National Elevation Dataset,...

In an effort to address growing concerns regarding the role of EE in children's environmental orientation, this study focused on three primary objectives. 1. the development of a reliable and valid survey instrument to measure the environmental attitudes and awareness of children. 2. a comparison of the baseline environmental attitudes and awareness of children from different age and ethnic groups. 3. an evaluation of EE program impacts on the environmental attitudes and awareness of children from different age and ethnic groups.

The Conference on the Ecology and Management of High Elevation Forests in the Central and Southern Appalachians was conceived to bring together managers, practitioners, and researchers working to better understand the unique issues relevant to high-elevation forests in the central and southern Appalachians. We invited Charles Cogbill (Harvard Forest) to summarize the biogeography of high-elevations forests in the central and southern Appalachians, Carolyn Copenheaver (Virginia Tech) to provide insight into the historical conditions of high-elevation forests in the region, Greg Nowacki (U.S....