scholarly journals Evaluating Potential Changes in Fire Risk fromEucalyptusPlantings in the Southern United States

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott L. Goodrick ◽  
John A. Stanturf

Renewed interest in short-rotation woody crops for bioenergy and bioproducts has prompted a reevaluation of theEucalyptusspecies for the southern United States. One question that arises about the potential effects of introducing a nonnative species is what effect will there be on fire behavior. Our approximate answer based on modeling fire behavior using the Fuel Characteristic Classification System is that surface fire behavior in young stands differs little from surface fires common to pine plantations in the southern Coastal Plain. By the age of 9, the absence of a shrub layer, along with an increased height to live crown, reduced initiation potential despite increased bark shedding. When a shrub layer was introduced in the model, the initiation potential became equivalent to commonPinusfuelbeds. If a crown is ignited, however, the potentials for transmissivity and spread are very high, and the potential for crown fire behavior is more severe. Our modeling effort suggests that fire behavior at the stand level differs little from current conditions and points to the importance of avoiding the development of a shrub layer. Stands managed on short rotation (less than 10 years) will likely be harvested before bark shedding presents a significant spotting problem.

Author(s):  
Nicholas L. Syrett

Using the 1937 Appalachian marriage of nine-year-old Eunice Winstead and twenty-two-year-old Charlie Johns, and the subsequent international attention it received as a prism, this chapter focuses on the persistence of very youthful marriage in the rural southern United States. During the Great Depression, when rates of marriage were down and the age of first marriage increased, minors continued to marry at very high numbers in rural southern states. This chapter argues that isolation, poverty, child labor, poor schooling, and the lack of age consciouness that was its consequence, account for this trend. In communities where calendar age had far less meaning than it did among the middle class and urban residents, white, black and Latino Americans in rural America continued to countenance child marriage in part because they did not see it as noteworthy. Urbanites voiced their horror for the practice in newspapers, magazines, and in film using a language of civilization to condemn those they perceived as backwards barbarians.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
J.G. Isebrands ◽  
R.S. Zalesny

The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service established three regional Institutes of Forest Genetics in the United States in the 1950s to improve trees for reforestation and improve the management of forests. The institute in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, started in 1956 as part of the Lake States Forest Experiment Station. Since that time, the “Rhinelander Lab” has undergone changes in research priorities, organizational changes, and name changes while becoming an international center of forest scientific excellence. Many of the researchers’ key findings over the years were published in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research. In this paper, for the 50th anniversary edition of the Journal, we reflect upon one part of those accomplishments: the history of the contributions of Populus L. research at Rhinelander. We discuss major research programs and the scientists conducting this work, including (i) physiology of wood formation, (ii) short rotation intensive culture and short rotation woody crops, (iii) intensively cultured plantations, (iv) physiology and utilization of short rotation poplar yields, (v) breeding and selection, (vi) biotechnology and molecular genetics, (vii) atmospheric pollution and climate change, (viii) phytotechnologies, and (ix) ecosystem services. Also, we describe four major international conferences held in Rhinelander and (or) hosted by Rhinelander researchers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-43
Author(s):  
Rachel E Greene ◽  
Kristine O Evans ◽  
Michael T Gray ◽  
D Todd Jones-Farrand ◽  
William G Wathen

Abstract Forestlands in the Southern United States provide important ecological and socioeconomic services that are under increasing pressure from development and other stressors. We used a coproduction approach with 50+ stakeholders to create a qualitative, spatially explicit Forest Retention Index to provide a gradient of future forest retention likelihood on presently forested lands. An estimated 17.7 million acres are at high risk of forest loss by 2060. These losses are largely driven by urbanization, but sea-level rise plays a key role in some coastal areas. Approximately 59 percent of southern forest is projected to be retained with High or Very High likelihood but is unevenly distributed among southern states. Approximately 8 percent of highly biodiverse forest is at high risk of land-use conversion. This tool provides a collaborative, transparent, and defensible mapping product that can aid in identification of key areas where retaining forest is critical to maintaining ecological and socioeconomic integrity.


2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (12) ◽  
pp. 2383-2393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger D. Ottmar ◽  
David V. Sandberg ◽  
Cynthia L. Riccardi ◽  
Susan J. Prichard

We present an overview of the Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS), a tool that enables land managers, regulators, and scientists to create and catalogue fuelbeds and to classify those fuelbeds for their capacity to support fire and consume fuels. The fuelbed characteristics and fire classification from this tool will provide inputs for current and future sophisticated models for the quantification of fire behavior, fire effects, and carbon accounting and enable assessment of fuel treatment effectiveness. The system was designed from requirements provided by land managers, scientists, and policy makers gathered through six regional workshops. The FCCS contains a set of fuelbeds representing the United States, which were compiled from scientific literature, fuels photo series, fuels data sets, and expert opinion. The system enables modification and enhancement of these fuelbeds to represent a particular scale of interest. The FCCS then reports assigned and calculated fuel characteristics for each existing fuelbed stratum including the canopy, shrubs, nonwoody, woody, litter–lichen–moss, and duff. Finally, the system classifies each fuelbed by calculating fire potentials that provide an index of the intrinsic capacity of each fuelbed to support surface fire behavior, support crown fire, and provide fuels for flaming, smoldering, and residual consumption. The FCCS outputs are being used in a national wildland fire emissions inventory and in the development of fuelbed, fire hazard, and treatment effectiveness maps on several national forests. Although the FCCS was built for the United States, the conceptual framework is applicable worldwide.


2017 ◽  
Vol 397 ◽  
pp. 126-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris A. Maier ◽  
Timothy J. Albaugh ◽  
Rachel I. Cook ◽  
Kevin Hall ◽  
Daniel McInnis ◽  
...  

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