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Green Forests Work
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Green Forests Work (GFW) exists to re-establish healthy and productive forests on formerly mined lands in Appalachia. Reforestation is an investment in a region that has invested so much into the economic expansion of our country. It is a necessary and cost effective investment that benefits Appalachia and beyond.
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Greenhouse Gases in Agriculture and Forests
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Dr. Grant Domke and Dr. Charles W. Rice discuss trends in GHG emissions over time, U.S. land sector GHG emissions and removals, the GHG emission intensity of agricultural commodities, and opportunities to reduce emissions and enhance soil carbon sequestration.
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News and Webinars
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Webinars
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Helping to Facilitate CASRI and SASRI Coordination
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Working at a landscape scale requires close coordination with multiple partners.
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News & Events
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Impact of Urbanization on Priority Bird Populations
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25 bird species models were developed to determine the sensitivity of priority bird species populations to urbanization.
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Research
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Impacts of mountaintop mining on terrestrial ecosystem integrity: identifying landscape thresholds for avian species in the central Appalachians, United States
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Reclaimed mine-dominated landscapes (less forest and more grassland/shrubland cover) elicited more negative (57 %) than positive (39 %) species responses. Negative thresholds for each landscape metric generally occurred at lower values than positive thresholds, thus negatively responding species were
detrimentally affected before positively responding species benefitted. Forest interior birds generally
responded negatively to landscape metric thresholds, interior edge species responses were mixed, and early
successional birds responded positively. The forest interior guild declined most at 4 % forest loss, while
the shrubland guild increased greatest after 52 % loss
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Climate Science Documents
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Initiative Heals Rare Forest and Recovers Squirrel
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Fortunately for the West Virginia northern flying squirrel and the Cheat Mountain salamander, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is supported by a number of partners, through the Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative (CASRI), in efforts to protect and restore historic red spruce-northern hardwood ecosystems across the high elevation landscapes of central Appalachia. The CASRI is a partnership of diverse interests with a common goal of protecting the remaining red spruce stands and restore red spruce ecosystems where they have disappeared.
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News & Events
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Insect herbivory alters impact of atmospheric change on northern temperate forests
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Stimulation of forest productivity by elevated concentrations of CO2 is expected to partially offset continued increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, multiple factors can impair the capacity of forests to act as carbon sinks; prominent among these are tropospheric O3 and nutrient limitations (1,2). Herbivorous insects also influence carbon and nutrient dynamics in forest ecosystems, yet are often ignored in ecosystem models of forest productivity. Here we assess the effects of elevated levels of CO2 and O3 on insect-mediated canopy damage and organic matter deposition in aspen and birch stands at the Aspen FACE facility in northern Wisconsin, United States. Canopy damage was markedly higher in the elevated CO2 stands, as was the deposition of organic substrates and nitrogen. The opposite trends were apparent in the elevated O3 stands. Using a light-use efficiency model, we show that the negative impacts of herbivorous insects on net primary production more than doubled under elevated concentrations of CO2, but decreased under elevated concentrations of O3. We conclude that herbivorous insects may limit the capacity of forests to function as sinks for anthropogenic carbon emissions in a high CO2 world.
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Climate Science Documents
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Interior Highland Shortleaf Pine Initiative
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The Interior Highlands region of Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma once supported vast expanses of shortleaf pine-bluestem woodlands, as well as mixed stands of pine-oak and oak-pine which were maintained by frequent fires. Over the past century 53% of these open pine stands have been significantly altered due to forest structural changes caused by eliminating fire from the ecosystem and conversion to other agricultural uses. This caused a significant decline in several priority bird species including the Brown-headed Nuthatch, Bachman’s Sparrow, Northern Bobwhite, Prairie Warbler, Whip-poor-will and federally endangered Red-Cockaded Woodpecker which all rely on open pine forest stands with a diverse grass and forb understory.
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Projects
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Invited Review: Quantifying surface albedo and other direct biogeophysical climate forcings of forestry activities
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By altering fluxes of heat, momentum, and moisture exchanges between the land surface and atmosphere, forestry and other land-use activities affect climate. Although long recognized scientifically as being important, these so-called biogeophysical forcings are rarely included in climate policies for forestry and other land management projects due to the many challenges associated with their quantification. Here, we review the scientific literature in the fields of atmospheric science and terrestrial ecology in light of three main objectives: (i) to elucidate the challenges associated with quantifying biogeophysical climate forcings connected to land use and land management, with a focus on the forestry sector; (ii) to identify and describe scientific approaches and/or metrics facilitating the quantification and interpretation of direct biogeophysical climate forcings; and (iii) to identify and recommend research priorities that can help overcome the challenges of their attribution to specific land-use activities, bridging the knowledge gap between the climate modeling, forest ecology, and resource management communities. We find that ignoring surface
biogeophysics may mislead climate mitigation policies, yet existing metrics are unlikely to be sufficient. Successful metrics ought to (i) include both radiative and nonradiative climate forcings; (ii) reconcile disparities between biogeophysical and biogeochemical forcings, and (iii) acknowledge trade-offs between global and local climate benefits. We call for more coordinated research among terrestrial ecologists, resource managers, and coupled climate modelers to harmonize datasets, refine analytical techniques, and corroborate and validate metrics that are more amenable to analyses at the scale of an individual site or region.
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Jantz, Patrick
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