Overabundant deer and invasive plants drive widespread regeneration debt in eastern United States national parks.

Advanced regeneration, in the form of tree seedlings and saplings, is critical for ensuring the long-term viability and resilience of forest ecosystems in the eastern United States. Lack of regeneration and/or compositional mismatch between regeneration and canopy layers, called regeneration debt, can lead to shifts in forest composition, structure, and, in extreme cases, forest loss. In this study, we examined status and trends in regeneration across 39 national parks from Virginia to Maine, spanning 12 years to apply the regeneration debt concept.

Trends in bird abundance differ among protected forests but not bird guilds.

Improved monitoring and associated inferential tools to efficiently identify declining bird populations, particularly of rare or sparsely distributed species, is key to informed conservation and management across large spatiotemporal regions. We assess abundance trends for 106 bird species in a network of eight forested national parks located within the northeast United States from 2006 to 2019 using a novel hierarchical model. We develop a multispecies, multiregion, removal-sampling model that shares information across species and parks to enable inference on rare species and sparsely sampled parks and to evaluate the effects of local forest structure.

Long-term trends indicate that invasive plants are pervasive and increasing in eastern national parks.

While invasive plant distributions are relatively well known in the eastern United States, temporal changes in species distributions and interactions among species have received little attention. Managers are therefore left to make management decisions without knowing which species pose the greatest threats based on their ability to spread, persist and outcompete other invasive species. To fill this gap, we used the U.

Density-Dependent Recruitment and Diapause in the Spring-Feeding Generation of Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (Hemiptera: Adelgidae) in Western North America.

Insect populations are affected by density-dependent and density-independent factors, and knowing how these factors affect long-term population growth is critical to pest management. In this study, we experimentally manipulated densities of the hemlock woolly adelgid on eastern and western hemlock trees in the western USA to evaluate the effects of density and host species on hemlock woolly adelgid crawler colonization. We then followed development of hemlock woolly adelgid on each hemlock species.

Evaluation of host range and larval feeding impact of Chrysolina aurichalcea asclepiadis (Villa): considerations for biological control of Vincetoxicum in North America.

A biological control program has been initiated against European swallow-worts Vincetoxicum nigrum (L.) Moench. and V.