Understanding how different intensities of timber harvesting affect species richness for plants and animals in North American forests will enable natural resource managers to better control the impacts of harvesting on flora and fauna communities. Previous syntheses have only examined thinning intensity as a categorical variable, comparing low and high intensity. This new meta-analysis examines how thinning intensity affects plant and animal species richness while examining the influence of other factors.

Understanding the effect of fishing activities on marine organism species richness is important for managing fisheries. Previous reviews and meta-analyses have focused on the relationship between bottom-fishing gears and invertebrate species richness, but there is a lack of understanding around other fishing gears (e.g., long lines and gillnets) and other taxa (e.g., ray-finned fishes).

Working forests serve an important role in providing timber products. At the same time, these forests are expected to contribute to mitigating climate change. With new studies being published, the authors performed an updated meta-analysis to synthesize the effects of forest thinning and clearcutting on three carbon pools—plants and roots, organic layer, and mineral soil—as well as examine how these effects interact with thinning intensity and time since harvest.

To make good decisions, researchers and practitioners need high-quality, consistent, and accessible forest data. Pilot forest accounts are one of the first steps in tracking ecosystems services, demonstrating how accounts can be created using available data and determining what questions they can help answer.

It’s critical for North Carolina agencies to focus their limited resources where they can have the greatest impact in recovering from Hurricane Helene. This analysis helps identify the species and locations most likely to have been severely affected, allowing agencies to prioritize on-the-ground assessments and recovery efforts where they are most needed.

Natural and working lands (NWLs) provide many benefits to people, including storing greenhouse gases (GHGs), supporting biodiversity, and generating other ecosystem services. Management of NWLs can influence their condition and function and therefore the benefits they provide. This project surveys the synthesis literature to assess how management actions on various types of NWLs affect biodiversity and GHG outcomes. This information can help to determine how to best manage these lands to contribute to both biodiversity and climate solutions in the United States.

Natural and working lands—forests, wetlands, coastal, and agricultural lands—provide many benefits, including supporting key economic sectors, enhancing community resilience to hazards such as fires and floods, and contributing to climate mitigation by storing large amounts of carbon. This guide is aimed at states interested in developing plans for conserving, managing, and restoring these lands to preserve and enhance their benefits. The guide uses examples from North Carolina’s recently completed Natural and Working Lands Action Plan to walk through the planning process, helpful resources, and the tracking of plan implementation.

Natural and working lands (NWL) in the United States provide many benefits, including food, climate mitigation, recreational opportunities, jobs, and many more. There is currently no coordinated approach in the United States to track how provision of these benefits is changing over time. This project begins to fill this gap by identifying datasets that can be used to track the status and trends of NWL benefits (i.e., ecosystem services), assessing their readiness for use in the near-term, and highlighting data gaps and limitations that need to be addressed for a national assessment.