SRS Strategic Framework - Mountains

Southern Appalachian Ecosystem Research and Sustainability

This Cross-Cutting Theme (CCT) will provide information needed for aquatic, riparian, and terrestrial systems that sustain habitat for wildlife and provide aesthetically-pleasing landscapes, while maintaining site productivity and production of wood fiber at sustainable levels. This CCT will develop a new integrating framework and expand research already underway associated with the mixed ownerships in the Southern Appalachian Region, including the Southern Appalachian Assessment. The goals of this research program are: 1) identify and test principles and develop ecologically based information applicable to management of Southern Appalachian forest ecosystems; 2) increase our knowledge of social and economic influences on forest resource management and the values derived from them; and, 3) develop and provide tools to forest managers in a form useful for integrating ecological and socioeconomic information to aid in forest management decisionmaking.

Kinds of Research

Scientists in the disciplines of silviculture, hydrology, fisheries, economics, plant pathology, forest engineering, wood utilization, forest management, and genetics will come together to address related research questions: 1) what are the values people associate with forests, and what are the benefits expected from forests, given these values? and 2) what are the capabilities of forested ecosystems to provide these benefits on a sustainable basis?

Integration across disciplines and spatial scales will be aided through the development of land management tools such as computerized decision support systems. Research activities are organized in three broad categories: 1) ecosystem dynamics, structure, and function; 2) social and economic influences; and 3) synthesis and integration.

Proposed Outcomes

1. Information, methods, and guidelines to implement and evaluate ecosystem management and associated effects on water, soil, vegetation, and other forest resources.
2. Principles, baseline data, and predictive methods to evaluate effects of the atmospheric environment on diverse forested watersheds.
3. An ecological classification system that provides for subdividing the forested landscape into units that provide a basis for predicting ecological response.
4. Principles and predictive methods for compositional and structural dynamics at the stand and landscape levels.
5. Methods to rehabilitate ecosystems.
6. Mitigation of effects of silvicultural practices on Neotropical migratory bird habitat and populations.
7. Understanding of values and benefits associated with Southern Appalachian forests.
8. Recreation demand and supply trends.
9. Recycling technology.
10. A comprehensive decision support system for the application of ecosystem management principles in forestland management that incorporates research knowledge in an explicit and user-friendly manner.

SRS Strategic Framework - Sustainability and Productivity of the Interior Highlands Ecosystem

This Cross-Cutting Theme (CCT) will build the integrating framework and scientific basis to support management of forest lands within mixed forest ownerships in the Interior Highlands (Ozark) Region of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. This effort will expand our long record of research in support of alternatives for private landowners. Research at two spatial scales--stand level and landscape level--will address sustainability and productivity issues within the social context of decisionmaking and linkages between ecological and social attributes.

The Interior Highlands CCT is built upon the prominence of Federal lands in the Ozark region, as well as the diverse mixture of Federal, State, private industrial, and private nonindustrial lands. Lying within northwest Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma, and southern Missouri, the Interior Highlands physiographic province is roughly 43 million acres in size, of which 23.1 million acres are forested; of that, about 3.8 million acres (16.4 percent) is national forest land--the Ouachita, Ozark-St.Francis, and Mark Twain.

Kinds of Research

The interdisciplinary approach in this CCT will include scientists and technical specialists from the fields of forestry, silviculture, wildlife biology, hydrology, engineering, entomology, genetics, plant pathology, and economics.

The landscape-scale research in the Ouachita Mountains includes studying vegetation, wildlife, aquatic ecology, and watershed to quantify changes in ecological attributes such as bird species diversity, woody and nonwoody dynamics, streamflow processes and channel structure, water quality and nutrient cycling, and fish and macroinvertebrate populations.

Key science questions in the CCT are: 1) what are the stand-level silvicultural, ecological, and socioeconomic effects of different silvicultural systems in the forest types of the Interior Highlands? 2) what are the cumulative effects on terrestrial, aquatic, and human ecosystems of forest management at the large scale across the Interior Highlands landscape? and, 3) what is the degree to which scientific advances in stand-level and landscape-scale research in the Interior Highlands will translate to other physiographic regions in the South and Midwest?

Proposed Outcomes

1. Conceptual and quantitative models to describe existing forest conditions and to predict response to silvicultural treatments in different regional ecosystems.
2. Technology transfer with Federal and private cooperators, presentations and field tours and results published through interdisciplinary collaboration.
3. Enhanced understanding of natural-regeneration stand dynamics and silviculture for upland pine, pine-hardwood, hardwood-pine, and hardwood stands in the Interior Highlands.
4. Guidelines and GIS-based models of wildlife habitat in upland pine, pine-hardwood, hardwood-pine, and hardwood stands, at stand-level and landscape-level scales, in the Interior Highlands.
5. Comparisons of herbaceous and shrub vegetation response among different reproduction-cutting methods, including site preparation and release.
6. GIS-based models of aquatic ecology and hydrology for evaluating alternative landscape management scenarios.

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