Dead wood, in the form of coarse woody debris and standing dead wood, or snags, is an essential structural component of forest ecosystems. It plays a key role in nutrient cycling, ecosystem functions and provision of habitat for a wide variety of species. In order to manage dead wood in a temperate hardwood forest, an understanding of its availability and spatial distribution is important. This...

Currently, information on forest biomass is available from a mixture of sources, including in-situ measurements, national forest inventories, administrative-level statistics, model outputs and regional satellite products. These data tend to be regional or national, based on different methodologies and not easily accessible. One of the few maps available is the Global Forest Resources Assessment...

Forestry today is on the threshold of promising change as biotechnology is introduced into its operations. Sophisticated tissue cultures for cloned seedlings and genetically modified organisms portend many benefits as more of the world’s industrial wood is being produced on planted forests. In many cases biotechnology in forestry is simply an extension of agricultural innovations, such as herbi...

Strategies to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions through forestry activities have been proposed, but ecosystem process-based integration of climate change, enhanced CO2, disturbance from fire, and management actions at regional scales are extremely limited. Here, we examine the relative merits of afforestation, reforestation, management changes, and harvest residue bioenergy use in the Pacific N...

Using forests to mitigate climate change has gained much interest in science and policy discussions. We examine the evidence for carbon benefits, environmental and monetary costs, risks and trade-offs for a variety of activities in three general strategies: (1) land use change to increase forest area (afforestation) and avoid deforestation; (2) carbon management in existing forests; and (3) the...

Wood is an important component of forested stream ecosystems, and stream restoration efforts often incorporate large wood. In most cases, however, stream restoration projects are implemented without information regarding the amount of wood that historically occurred or the natural rates of wood recruitment. This study uses a space-for-time analysis to quantify large wood loading to 28 streams i...

Forests in boreal and temperate forest-ecosystems have importance for carbon balance since they sequester large amount of atmospheric carbon by uptake of carbon-dioxide during photosynthesis, and transfer and store carbon in the forest ecosystem. Forest material can be used for bio-fuel purposes and substitute fossil fuels, and supply wood products, which can replace carbon-and-energy-intensive...

We used a gravity model to investigate determinants of China’s pulp and paper products trade from 1995 to 2005. The results show that an importing country’s economy size, forest endowment, distance to China, exchange rate, and membership in Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), plus China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its forest products policy change implemented in ...

Consequential life cycle assessment (CLCA) has emerged as a tool for estimating environmental impacts of changes in product systems that go beyond physical relationships accounted for in attributional LCA (ALCA). This study builds on recent efforts to use more complex economic models for policy-based CLCA. A partial market equilibrium (PME) model, called the U.S. Forest Products Module (USFPM),...

BACKGROUND Despite empirical support for an increase in ecosystem productivity with species diversity in synthetic systems, there is ample evidence that this relationship is dependent on environmental characteristics, especially in structurally more complex natural systems. Empirical support for this relationship in forests is urgently needed, as these ecosystems play an important role in carbo...