Snags (standing dead trees) are an essential structural component of forests. Because wildlife use of snags depends on size and decay stage, snag density estimation without any information about snag quality attributes is of little value for wildlife management decision makers. Little work has been done to develop models that...
Various methods have been used to estimate the amount of above ground forest biomass across landscapes and to create biomass maps for specific stands or pixels across ownership or project areas. Without an accurate estimation method, land managers might end up with incorrect biomass estimate maps, which could lead them...
Palms are an important component of tropical ecosystems, living alongside dicotyledonous trees, even though they have a very different growth pattern and vascular system. As monocots, vessels in palms are located within vascular bundles and, without a vascular cambium that many dicotyledonous trees possess, palms cannot add additional vessels to...
Tornadoes represent a unique natural hazard because of the very low probability of
occurrence, short warning times (on the order of only a few minutes), and the intense and
destructive forces imposed on engineered and non-engineered buildings. The very low-probability very high-consequence nature of a tornado strike makes designing for...
We have developed a method for determining the response of a static, partially ordered ensemble of molecules to various types of electromagnetic probes. In our formalism a physical model is constructued for the orientational distribution function, which is represented as a volume integral over a set of weighting functions. Procedures...
We have expanded on the results of an earlier paper [J. Chem. Phys. 72, 221 (1980)] which deals with a method for determining the response of a static, partially ordered ensemble of molecules to various types of electromagnetic probes. In this paper we consider types of spectroscopy whose response depends...
Accurately simulating gross primary productivity (GPP) in terrestrial ecosystem models is critical because errors in simulated GPP propagate through the model to introduce additional errors in simulated biomass and other fluxes. We evaluated simulated, daily average GPP from 26 models against estimated GPP at 39 eddy covariance flux tower sites...
We have developed a new approach to the theory of linear dichroism in partially ordered systems. The description of the partially ordered ensemble uses a density of states function, D(θ, ϕ, Δ), which gives the probability that the direction of polarization for incident polarized light has spherical angles θ and...
Finite element analysis was used to study the effective transverse modulus of solid wood for all possible end-grain patterns. The calculations accounted for cylindrical anisotropy of wood within rectangular specimens and explicitly modeled wood as a composite of earlywood and latewood. The effective modulus was significantly reduced by growth ring...
This is the synthesis of a series of studies to evaluate perceptions of U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service (USFS) law enforcement and investigations (LEI). Five groups were evaluated: four groups of employees from different positions within LEI, and a group of customers of LEI, the line officers of the...