Climate change is presenting a global challenge to society and ecosystems. This is changing long-standing methods to determine the values of forests to include their role in climate mitigation and adaptation, alongside traditional forest products and services. Forests have become increasingly important in climate change dialogues, beyond international climate negotiations, because of their framing as a Natural Climate Solution (NCS) or Nature-Based Solution (NBS). In turn, the term “Climate-Smart Forestry” (CSF) has recently entered the vernacular in myriad disciplines and decision-making circles espousing the linkage between forests and climate. This new emphasis on climate change in forestry has a wide range of interpretations and applications. This review finds that CSF remains loosely defined and inconsistently applied. Adding further confusion, it remains unclear how existing guidance on sustainable forest management (SFM) is relevant or might be enhanced to include CSF principles, including those that strive for demonstrable carbon benefits in terms of sequestration and storage. To contribute to a useful and shared understanding of CSF, this paper (1) assesses current definitions and framing of CSF, (2) explores CSF gaps and potential risks, (3) presents a new definition of CSF to expand and clarify CSF, and (4) explores sources of CSF evidence.

We are interested in predicting one or more continuous forest variables (e.g., biomass, volume, age) at a fine resolution (e.g., pixel level) across a specified domain. Given a definition of forest...

Predictive models of malaria vector larval habitat locations may provide a basis for understanding the spatial determinants of malaria transmission.

Wood density is strongly related to key aspects of tree physiological performance. While many studies have examined wood density in different parts of trees, for a variety of reasons, there are very few studies that have compared within-tree density variation across many trees, of many species, drawn from a large geographic area. Here, a large data set representing thousands of trees of 78 species/genera, drawn from hundreds of sites in the Eastern United States, was compiled and analyzed to explore branch to main stem wood basic density relationships. It was expected that differences in stem vs. branch wood density among trees would be due to both genetic constraints and plastic responses in wood properties, due to tree growth responses to external environments. The results show a wide tree-to-tree variation in average branch density, relative to main stem density. However, there was a general pattern for overstory tree species to have high tree branch density relative to stem density at lower stem densities, and a declining branch to stem wood density ratio as stem density increased. Evergreen gymnosperms showed the strongest change in branch to stem wood density ratios over the range of stem wood densities and deciduous angiosperms the least; deciduous gymnosperms showed an intermediate pattern, but with generally higher branch- than stem- wood densities. More cold-hearty, shade-tolerant/drought-intolerant, evergreen gymnosperms, growing at higher latitudes, showed higher branch to stem density ratios than more shade-intolerant/drought tolerant evergreen gymnosperms growing at lower latitudes. Across all trees, canopy position had a significant influence on branch to stem density relationships, with higher branch to stem density ratios for canopy dominant trees and successively lower branch to stem density ratios for trees in successively inferior canopy positions (in terms of light availability). Understory tree species, which remain in the forest understory at maximum height, showed generally lower branch than stem densities over a wide range of stem densities. The results suggested that tradeoffs between mechanical safety and whole-tree hydraulic conductance are driving within-tree differences in wood density and highlighted the need for more detailed examinations of within-tree density variation at the whole-tree level.