How Do Weather, Insects, and Diseases Impact Forests? It Depends
Forests of the southern U.S. are among the most productive and intensively managed in the world. Disturbances naturally alter forest… More
Group Selection Harvest for White Oak Regeneration
Oaks are keystone species in forests across the eastern U.S. However, oak reproduction has been declining since at least the 1970s — old oaks still dominate the overstory, but a younger generation is not coming in behind. White oak, in particular, is valuable to wildlife and wood-dependent industries such as barrel, furniture, and cabinet making.… More
Climate Change and Red Spruce
Red spruce faces a variety of challenges in the southern Appalachians — from past exploitative logging to land use change and forest fragmentation, and now climate change. A three-year study funded by the National Science Foundation is investigating historic red spruce decline in abundance and range shifts — as well as how those shifts might… More
Top Ten of 2020
As 2020 comes to an end, it is a good time to gather our most-read CompassLive stories from the past year. Each one highlights the work of USDA Forest Service scientists at the Southern Research Station. We hope you enjoy reading this collection, which includes the most popular of 2020 plus a few more that… More
Impacts of Urbanization on U.S. Watersheds
Urbanization is inevitable with a growing population, but what consequences does this have for the water we rely on? Cheng Li, a former visiting scholar at North Carolina State University from the Guangdong Academy of Sciences, along with USDA Forest Service scientists Ge Sun, Peter Caldwell, and Erika Mack modeled the effects of urbanization on… More
Forest Landowners and State Property Tax Programs
Every state in the U.S. has a property tax program that lowers taxes for forest landowners. Greg Frey and Stephanie Snyder of the USDA Forest Service, with Justin Meier, Michael Kilgore, and Charlie Blinn of the University of Minnesota recently published two papers that build on their previous analysis of all fifty state property tax… More
New Science Synthesis on Soils and Soil Management
We don’t often think about what’s underneath our feet, but soils are essential for the food we eat, building materials for our homes, the clean water we drink, storing carbon and mitigating climate change, even the air we breathe. Our health and well-being depend on healthy soils. It may be time to take a closer… More
Wildfire Recovery Hot Moments
Disasters can be catalysts for change. As wildfires become more common, an emerging objective is to make communities fire-adapted, where ecological benefits of fire can be realized while minimizing threats to life and property. Yet questions remain as to when and how such community change takes place. Recent research by Ronald Schumann of University of… More
SRS Releases American Chestnut Course
The American chestnut (Castanea dentata) was an iconic tree that is now functionally extinct. For a hundred years, researchers from multiple organizations have been working to restore this tree. A free online course – An Introduction to the American Chestnut – is now available. The course covers chestnut taxonomy, silvics, historical importance, ecology, and its… More
Working Together Towards Chestnut Restoration
On November 3, about forty people from the USDA Forest Service and The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) gathered virtually. It was the second biennial plan of work meeting between TACF and SRS. Since the 1990s, the two organizations have worked together on American chestnut (Castanea dentata) restoration. In 2017 and in 2019, they committed to… More
FIA One-Click Factsheet Wins Agency Honor Award
Every year since 1930, scientists from across the USDA Forest Service team up with state agencies to survey the nation’s forests, as they have since 1930. The field crews are part of the Forest Inventory and Analysis program, or FIA, a national census of forest land and forest conditions. This massive campaign collects data on… More