Forestry herbicides are a versatile, cost-eff ective tool that can be used in a variety of ways to help manage forest vegetation. Managing forests to grow selected crop trees is similar to growing agriculture crops: there are usually undesirable plants or weeds present that interfere with desirable crop plants. In agriculture, weeds are controlled by various vegetation management practices, including the use of herbicides, to increase the availability of site resources for desirable crops. In forestry, herbicides can also be used to control undesirable plants so that sunlight, soil moisture,...

Pioneering research by Alex L. Shigo and his associates has produced a series of pictorial guidelines to provide a better understanding of how trees respond to wounding and subsequent microbial infections that lead to wood decay. The purpose of this paper is to visually summarize through the use of 96 color photographs and illustrations, the varied patterns of wood discoloration and decay observed in the dissection of thousands of trees. This information has served as a conceptual framework for understanding the biochemical processes that limit the spread of wood-destroying infections...

Decades of study on climatic change and its direct and indirect effects on forest ecosystems provide important insights for forest science, management, and policy. A synthesis of recent research from the northeastern United States and eastern Canada shows that the climate of the region has become warmer and wetter over the past 100 years and that there are more extreme precipitation events. Greater change is projected in the future. The amount of projected future change depends on the emissions scenarios used. Tree species composition of northeast forests has shifted slowly in response to...

Forest restoration would be greatly helped by understanding just what forests looked like a century or more ago. One source of information on early forests is found in old deeds or surveys, where boundary corners were described by noting nearby trees known as witness trees. This paper describes the creation and analysis of a database of witness trees from original metes and bounds surveys of what became the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. We include an estimate of positional error from the conversion of paper maps to digital format. The final database contains 15,589 corners and...

Bottom land hardwood sites are known to have some of the most productive forest soils, and species richness tends to be high on these sites. Due to high species richness and associated stand stratification, competition control is often essential to hardwood regeneration efforts. Midstory injection has long been recognized as a viable and cost effective method in controlling undesirable stems (Williston and others 1976). Peairs and others (2004) reported that midstory/understory control treatment increased regeneration of desirable hardwood species such as oaks. Lockhart and others reported...

The national Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) Program of the Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, has three main objectives (Riitters and Tkacz 2004): (1) to identify forest ecosystems where conditions might be deteriorating in subtle ways over large areas; (2) to verify and define the extent of deterioration in forest ecosystems where potential problems are identified; and (3) to understand the processes that cause forest health problems so strategies can be developed for problem mitigation and prevention.

Global forest resources are under attack, not just from native pests, but also increasingly from alien or non-indigenous forest pests that are finding their way to new ecosystems and in some cases causing serious mortality and damage. Examples of these invasions can be found in forests worldwide, and in most cases, the introduction of the pests can be linked to international trade. Many countries have documented the interception of insect pests on imported wood and wood products, and such data indicate that pests are coming from and going to most trading nations. All countries are therefore...

Contains 10 full-length papers and 12 abstracts of posters that were presented at the 3rd Fire in Eastern Oak Forests conference, held in Carbondale, IL, May 20-22, 2008. The conference was attended by over 200 people from a variety of groups, including federal and state agencies, nongovernmental organizations, universities, and private citizens.

These papers, presented in a special session at the International Symposium on Society and Resource Management in June 2011, explore the transdisciplinary fi eld of futures research and its application to long-range environmental analysis, planning, and policy. Futures research began in the post-World War II era and has emerged as a mature research fi eld. Although the future of complex social-ecological systems cannot be predicted, these papers show how futures research can offer perspectives and methods that help researchers, decisionmakers, and other stakeholders explore alternative...

Ozone is a highly toxic air contaminant that has been shown to decrease tree growth and cause signifi cant disturbance to forested ecosystems. Ozone also causes distinct foliar injury symptoms to certain species (bioindicator plants) that can be used to detect and monitor ozone stress (biomonitoring) in the forest environment. In the early 1990s, the U.S. Forest Service, in partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, developed and implemented a suite of forest health indicators to respond to emerging demands for a comprehensive assessment of the health of U.S. forests. This...