Research

Decision Support System

gracec — 2015-12-04T19:20:50Z

Silviculture & Ecophysiology

doutlaw — 2013-05-20T17:15:25Z

The silviculture & ecophysiology group is establishing a regionwide monitoring network to evaluate the effects of climate, soils, and management approaches planted pine carbon sequestration rates and develop standardized methods to quantify carbon, water, and nutrient storage and flux baselines, as well as responses to climate and management.

Tier I (Legacy Experiments) consists of sites chosen from an existing network of several thousand growth and yield cooperative plots which blanket the region to provide extensive, spatially-explicit information on regional variability in productivity. A wide range of growth and yield trial series are available, some of which include management treatments such as planting density, thinning, fertilization, and weed control. Most of these plots have repeated tree inventory measurements (i.e., survival, trees/acre, and tree height and diameter) and thus provide excellent information on spatial and temporal variability in tree productivity across the soil and climate factors in the region.

Click here to view a map of the Tier I (Legacy Experiment) sites.

Tier II (Active Experiments) consists of sites chosen from existing cooperative field studies and planted pine AmeriFlux installations which cover the full range of climate and soils in the region, and most of which include replicated silvicultural treatments. All of these trials have multiple historical tree inventory measurements, and some have additional carbon and nitrogen budget measurements. Tier II sites are being selected based on the strength of existing data for each trial and to maximize variation in geography, soils, climate, stand age, and treatment (focusing on nutritional, competition control, and thinning or planting density treatments). New, more intensive measurements on Tier II sites enable standardized quantification of carbon and nitrogen pools and fluxes including soil heterotrophic respiration, the key link between net primary production and net ecosystem production.

Click here to view a map of the Tier II (Active Experiment) sites.

Tier III (Throughfall Exclusion and Fertilization Experiments) consist of experiments established in four key locations at the edges of the loblolly pine range which span the full temperature and precipitation range of the species. Rainfall exclusion structures have been installed to reduce precipitation by 30% which is at the extreme end of predictions for precipitation and/or soil moisture variation associated with climate change for the region. Furthermore, because most planted pine forests are nutrient limited and nutrient management is widespread, it is important to examine the interaction of rain throughfall exclusion treatment with an imposed nutritional gradient on Tier 3.

Click here to view a map of the Tier III (Throughfall Exclusion & Fertilization Experiment) sites.

At sites in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, Buckingham County, Virginia, Taliaferro County, Georgia, and Taylor County, Florida, four replications of a 2x2 factorial experiment are being installed with the following treatments:

Control: no treatment
Fertilizer: fertilizer additions to achieve "optimum" nutrition
Throughfall exclusion: panels installed in understory to divert 30% of throughfall off of the plot
Fertilizer + rain throughfall exclusion: combined fertilizer and throughfall exclusion treatments

Data being collected within the three-tiered monitoring network includes:

Vegetation and soil sampling (including leaf area, standing live and dead trees, understory vegetation, coarse and fine woody detritus, forest floor and soil organic matter, roots, and chemical and physical soil properties collected at various depths).
Growth response data combined with carbon and nitrogen pool data to determine nitrogen use efficiency.
Various ecophysiological measurements (including sap flow measurements, transpiration and whole-tree water use, wood density measurements, and soil respiration).

Modeling

doutlaw — 2013-05-20T19:47:18Z

The modeling team is applying a multi-scaled modeling program incorporating monitoring data from the PINEMAP three-tiered, regionwide monitoring network with spatially-explicit historical and predicted future climate data to assess alternative forest management approaches and the impacts on carbon sequestration and resilience to disturbance.

The existing inventory from the extensive PINEMAP Tier I network, as well as existing inventory and new carbon and nutrient dynamics data from PINEMAP Tier II and III networks and experimental manipulations, are being used to parameterize and validate a coordinated series of open-source models ranging in complexity and scale from tree- to regional-level. These models will be used to design and test novel forest management systems focused on greenhouse gas mitigation, enhanced resource use efficiency, and resilience to climate change.

The models developed will be used to analyze a range of management, climate, and disturbance scenarios. Effective mitigation and adaptation to climate change in forests requires a large-scale approach that explicitly considers trade-offs between different goals. The modeling team will evaluate climate change mitigation and adaptation trade-offs so that optimal management strategies can be developed at the landscape to regional level.

PINEMAP is utilizing four primary models:

Growth and Yield models (Forest Modeling Research Cooperative; Plantation Management Research Cooperative)
3-PG (Physiological Principles in Predicting Growth; Landsberg & Waring, 1997)
NASA CASA (Carnegie Ames Stanford Approach; Potter et al., 1999)
WaSSI (Water Supply Stress Index Model; Sun et al., 2008)

Genetics

doutlaw — 2013-05-20T17:36:54Z

The genetics team is developing guidelines to help growers understand where to plant specific southern pine seed sources given future climate scenarios and identify genes controlling traits such as growth, nitrogen responsiveness, cold hardiness, water usage, and resistance to southern pine beetle and fungal diseases.

Current seed deployment guidelines for southern pines are based primarily on survival and growth data from the Southwide Southern Pine Seed Source Study (SSPSSS) conducted from 1950 to the 1980s with wild seed under historical weather conditions. Since the SSPSSS, the tree improvement cooperatives have conducted more extensive, large-scale provenance, family, and clone tests across the physiographic regions. Provenance trials have demonstrated that loblolly pine from the East grows faster than the interior western material, which is better adapted to a more continental climate with more extreme temperatures and precipitation. This knowledge has led to widespread planting of field-tested Atlantic Coastal Plain families on industry lands in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma rather than locally adapted stock.

The best planting decisions are based on growth and survival data obtained from genetic tests that are 10-20 years old. Such information, however, is available for only a limited set of environments, and the impacts of changing climate during the rotation are rarely taken into account. Thus, the goal of the genetics team is to inform future deployment decisions with projected climate change scenarios taking into account uncertainty and risk introduced by performance instability. Specifically, the team is investigating the basis of pine productivity and adaptive traits by conducting linkage and association mapping to identify alleles that can be screened in populations, helping to accelerate improvement of productivity and adaptive traits.

To understand how different genotypes respond to climate, the genetics and breeding team is using a uniform response function (URF) approach which models performance corrected for the weather at the progeny test site and climate at the source of origin for the select trees. The three tree improvement cooperatives involved in PINEMAP have each selected a set of progeny tests appropriate for this analysis and have developed databases with the locations for all progeny tests and select tree families. For the western region, the Western Gulf Forest Tree Improvement Program will analyze data from two series of tests (tags labeled "3" in the map). For the central part of the region, the North Carolina State University Cooperative Tree Improvement Program will analyze data from a series of tests planted across the region (tags labeled "1" in map). Finally, the Cooperative Forest Genetics Research Program at the University of Florida will analyze data from tests from four different coastal provenances (tags labeled "2" in map).

Studies are being conducted in three complimentary populations:

Plantation Selection Seed Source Study (PSSSS)
Comparing Clonal Lines On Experimental Sites (CCLONES)
Allele Discovery of Economic Pine Traits2 (ADEPT2)

In addition, the team is developing a new population for a Southwide field test that includes region-wide crosses and material from extremes of the natural range.

Economics & Policy

doutlaw — 2013-01-10T19:59:12Z

The economics and policy team is analyzing life-cycle carbon balance of regional forest management systems and conducting multi-scale analyses of market and non-market forest benefits and services to provide the framework necessary to guide land manager decision-making under future management and climatic conditions. The team is conducting comprehensive life cycle analyses of regional forest management systems and multi-scale policy and economic analysis of market and non-market forest benefits and services. Research will evaluate regional tradeoffs and interactions among policy, climate scenarios, carbon/water/nutrient/energy footprints, forest management, and genetic deployment and assess adoption of alternative approaches by private landowners.

Specifically, the economics and policy team is

conducting a comprehensive life cycle analysis (LCA) to quantify global warming impacts of various silvicultural practices and systems typical of non-industrial private forest (NIPF) landowners and industrial forest landowners. The information provided by the LCA will be used to calculate the environmental and financial criteria to determine optimal management regimes and rotation ages;
exploring how carbon sequestration and mitigation efforts will affect ecological functions, goods and services;
assessing the current and expected features of federal and state policies and programs anticipated to significantly impact climate change mitigation efforts in planted pine forests;
utilizing surveys to evaluate the expected adoption of altered silvicultural practices for industrial and NIPF landowner management activities;
assessing and comparing the risk and economic consequences (i.e., impact on timber and carbon values) of forest fire and southern pine beetle outbreaks under climate change with and without adaptation;
modeling regional product market and carbon consequences of business-as-usual scenarios and potential new silvicultural management regimes.